


Private  Vices

by qnchrpoint



Category: Throne of Glass Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Background Relationships, Class Issues, Crack Treated Seriously, Cultural References, F/F, Fix-It of Sorts, Immigration & Emigration, Interracial Relationship, Rare Pairings, Slow Build, all the associated baggage with all those other tags
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-25
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2018-04-27 23:33:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 46,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5069173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qnchrpoint/pseuds/qnchrpoint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After breaking up with her secret summer boyfriend, Dorian Havilliard, Crown Prince of Adarlan, Sorscha attracts the attention of (apparently notorious somewhere or other) billionaire heiress Kaltain Rompier. The subsequent turn of events is not as productive as one would have hoped.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. nothing so soon forgot

**Author's Note:**

> This makes no sense? Well it's too late. I've become overly invested in my self-indulgence. A large portion of this work was written before the publication of 'A Queen of Shadows' and so we will be playing fast and loose with 'canon'.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorscha breaks up with her boyfriend and her brother gets into trouble for something involving a motorcycle. This somehow necessitates calling up suspicious strangers interested in her ex.

“Let’s break up.”

 

Halfway between air and plate, Dorian’s spoon fell from his hand, onto the table and bounced, uncharacteristically inelegantly, to the floor. 

 

The harsh noise of it clattering on the polished marble echoed all the way up to the high ceilings — sharp and angry — yet the diner’s paid them no mind. They turned for just a second to inspect the scene but quickly passing over it when they saw Dorian’s apparent composure. Maybe the distance they were sitting, it really was nothing to linger on. An accidental slip of the fingers. It would be rude to stare.

 

But up close, caught in the action, Sorscha wished she were anywhere else.

 

She saw his Adam’s apple quiver for a moment, like he was trying to force some sound of his throat but no words came. She wrung her fingers tightly through the pristine white tablecloth of the restaurant – the _fancy_ and _elegant_ and surely _expensive_ restaurant on top of a skyscraper that was most assuredly exclusive– Dorian had brought them to. She waited, but looking at his face, practiced smile persisting though the confusion and hurt, was too much. She couldn’t keep looking at those eyes. His perfect, practiced smile hadn’t faltered in the least, but Sorscha could see his blue eyes dull. He didn’t even bother looking at the spoon as it fell. Instead his posture was frozen, his handsome face stuck – staring at her, trying to discern something invisible.

 

“S-Sorry?” Dorian said. “I think I misheard you.”

 

“Let’s break up,” she said again. 

 

Dorian inhaled, and leaned back – more like collapsed back, deflating like a punctured tire – into his chair. He ran a hand though his neatly combed hair, slicked back for the occasion, and shook loose a few wavy black strands. 

 

“I don’t understand. Was it something I did? Something I said? Something someone said about you? Because, I swear, Sorscha, if anyone said a word about you I’ll—”

 

“No! No, it’s not that.” Some people had choice words to say about Dorian’s choice in girlfriend but he and his friends had always defended her and assured her it was no problem at all. Even now, on the brink and of an impending break up, Dorian was as kind and loyal as always. “You’ve been wonderful.”

“‘Been’,” Dorian repeated carefully, like his mouth was dry with chalk and the words cut at his tongue. “So, was it something that happened lately? Did I—?”

 

“Dorian, it’s not you.”

  
“Playing the ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ card?” He smiled wryly and Sorscha was reminded that media spotlight on his love life wasn’t unwarranted considering the strings of other women he’d left with that. “I’m familiar _that_.” 

 

“Dorian.”

 

He reached across the table to take one of her hands in both of his. “Sorscha, I know I wasn’t the greatest person when we started dating, but I really am changing. You showed me a lot about myself and, well, you’ve made me want to become a better person. This is difficult for me to say, but I really— I— I—” He swallowed a lump down in his throat. His hand gripped hers. Whatever he was going to do, Sorscha thought it’d be too cruel to allow him to say it, especially when she had every intention of going through with her words.

 

“I want to break up with you,” she said again, clear as she could.

 

Dorian inhaled deeply. He removed his hands from hers and laid them neatly in his lap, staring at his napkin instead of looking at her face.

 

“I’m awful,” she said. “I know this is terrible. And I was going to do it sooner, but then you brought me here and— And you put so much effort into tonight, Dorian, that I _couldn’t_. I thought I could just let it go on a little longer but we’re running out of time and I know the worst thing I could do to you was drag it out any longer, especially when you— Especially when you were—”

 

‘When you were looking at me like that,’ she wanted to say but couldn’t finish. Dorian seemed to understand her. He lowered his gaze. He must have known how he was looking at her, that soppy, forlorn expression on his face and that stillness in his eyes. He was always so kind. He understood. She always appreciated that about him but now it was a double-edged sword and his consideration of her in the face of such hurt stung. There were thousands of girls across the country that would hate her for this. She was thankful then, at least, that their relationship had been a secret, a whirlwind summer romance no one had seen coming—not even them.

 

Dorian looked at there again, really _looked_ at her, like he was committing it to memory and burning the image in the synapses of his brain. He opened his mouth, licked his lips and Sorscha saw his chest rise and fall, trying and failing to push out the wind for form words.

 

“It’s just… You’ve graduated now,” she said, so he wouldn’t have to keep going and trying and failing like that. She could see words and dreams dying in the back of his throat and in the rattled breathing that came with the up-down of his shoulders and chest and neck. “And soon you’ll be off doing all your diplomatic things and political visits and royal duties and ambassador work and— and I can’t hold you back from that.”

 

The absolute rule of Adarlan’s monarchy had long since given its way to constitutions and prime ministers and a bustling House of Representatives. The Royal Family, though often regarded as bland figureheads of a dying time, still served symbolic purposes, travelling around the world on diplomatic visits despite their lack of political power. 

 

Even if he would never rule or lead like the kings of old, Dorian was destined for that: to be a symbol and personification of Adarlan, ever watched and always representing and, in times of crisis, fronting a human face to the government and calling for calm collected action, maybe like his grandfather had done all those years ago when radio was still new and princes had just begun to turn their talents to being showmen and presenters and speech givers. Dorian was charismatic, at least. He’d have little problem with that part of the role. Handsome and tall and kind; it was no wonder half the girls in Adarlan stuck pictures of him in their notebooks and drew hearts around them dreaming of their own fairytale romance.

 

And now Sorscha had tasted that schoolgirl fantasy and found it altogether more bitter than it had ever seemed in movies and magazines. And now she was throwing it away.

 

Dorian kept looking at her, searching for something as far and distant as the seas reflected in his blue eyes — like the whole eastern coast of Adarlan, sheer stones beaches grey and bleeding away into the blue water. Like all of Adarlan. Like a real _prince_ out of a story. Her own fairy tale being returned, shrink wrapped in plastic, back to the bookstore complete with receipt and recyclable cloth bag, trendy graphic abstraction of the environmental crusade printed on the front.

 

“I can’t wait for you,” she said. “I don’t want to wait for you.”

 

“If I expected you to wait, then you wouldn’t be the girl I fell in love with.” He was perfectly still, just looking at her. His mouth didn’t move any more than necessary to form the words, clear and crisp as a public broadcast. His voice, though, was quiet—distant like a radio played on the other end of an echoing hall.

 

“This relationship… It’s just bad timing. And I don’t want to just see you have to go through that. I want to go to university. I want to get a good job. I want to do something to help society. I want to be useful. A doctor.” It was strange: saying her dreams out loud, giving more form to abstract notions and fanciful thoughts. It felt like a promise. “I want to help. And you’re going to help this world too, Dorian and— We can’t hold each other back. It’s for both of us.”

 

“For both of us,” he agreed. His fingers twitched and he jammed them over the silk-trimmed lapels of his dinner jacket. His eyes stayed on hers.

 

“I’m sorry. I should have said something sooner,” she said. 

 

He cradled his forehead in his hands, finally tearing his gaze from her. If he had found what he was looking for, it didn’t give him much strength. 

 

“You were just being so nice, Dorian,” she stuttered as though it was a good excuse for dragging out his evening.  She felt like that girl by the swimming pool again when they had first met, mortified she’d spoken out of turn, mortified she’d embarrassed the Crown Prince.“I didn’t— I’m sorry.”

 

“No. No, don’t be sorry.” Sorscha saw the way he collected himself up, posture slowly straightening and rising, a trained charm curling up his slowly, vertebrae by vertebrae. His back straightened. His shoulders stood taller. His gaze was steady, clouds clearing from the sky. He smiled, slow and steady and careful. Sorscha heard a heart break and she wasn’t sure whose it was. Then he leaned back in his chair, a careless and easy confidence, a teenage boy hanging off furniture with reckless teenage boy abandon, like he was gesturing around the halls of a family-run pizzeria. “At least tell me you like the place.”

 

“It’s beautiful,” Sorscha said. It could’ve been about the restaurant: all marble floors and ceilings and crystal chandeliers scattering dappled light around. It could have been about anything, especially his face, eyes lined with silver, but still stunning as the sky at dust, bleeding blue into black into an abyss of stars.

 

“I’m glad we had this night together.” He winked. “It’d be worse if I went though all the trouble of planning this and you didn’t even get to enjoy it. It’s hard to get a reservation here, you know.”

 

She knew. That was a testament to how famous the place was, actually. Even _she_ knew it. That would have made a good joke actually. Maybe it would have lightened the mood if she said it. But she didn’t and she wasn’t sure if too much time had passed to pretend she could say anything that counted as a response to his words.

 

She tried anyway. There was nothing else to do. “I know. That it’s hard to find a reservation here, I mean. That must mean it’s a famous place. I mean, if even _I_ know it.”

 

Dorian chuckled. His eyes shimmered. Sorscha wondered if it was the wrong thing to say. “You never _were_ interested in things like that.” He must have caught the way he was looking at her, because he turned to observe the great, billowing curtains that framed the windows of the building, great and glass and stretching all the way to its high ceilings. “It’s a nice view. This is what sky dining is all about, right? A restaurant with a real view… Dinner near the clouds. Only at Rifthold Tower.”

 

The restaurant occupied the whole floor and there were balconies all the way around. If you walked enough around, you could see a panoramic view of Rifthold, all courtesy of being on the sixty fourth floor of Rifthold’s tallest telecommunication and office building. The floor below was an observation deck for the tourists. Everything above was apartments for the fabulously rich and wealthy, high above the rabble.

 

“It really is nice.”

 

There was only so much small talk they could scrape up. Dorian sighed again — a sound she was getting tired of hearing. “So this is it, huh?”

 

She said, “I guess it is.”

 

He laid his hands on the table, resolved. Sorscha saw a glimmer of the statesmen he’d one day become. It was a far cry from the careless, flighty boy she’d met at the public pool, wet hair sopping a damp grey ring down the collar of his T-shirt. She was happy for him, she told herself. She was sure of it. She was happy for him.

 

“Even after we’ve broken up… Well, I guess we’re broken up already. But, I mean, after we leave this building. Can I still talk to you about things? For advice and things, I mean. What I’m trying to say— Oh, wow, this really is a night of clichés. Can we still be friends?”

 

“Oh, Dorian, of course. Of course we can.” 

 

His smile was blinding.

 

“I just,” she began and immediately saw the light behind his eyes dim. “I think before that, we just need to have some space from each other. For closure.”

 

“So we definitely know we won’t be a couple, huh?” he joked. “I think you’re right. I would have been too tempted to try and win you back.”

 

“And anyway, you’ll be going off to the deepest darkest parts of the Oakwald forest, right? Off the grid.”

 

“Off the grid,” Dorian echoed, grinning. With his refusal to properly consider a university after graduating that summer, his father had forced him to do at least one ‘productive’ thing over his gap year. He’d elected to go through some basic military training. Good press. The fact his best friend Chaol would be supervising most of it didn’t hurt matters much either. At least, that had been his opinion a week ago. “Doesn’t seem as great now.”

 

“You’ll do fine. Wonderful, even.”

 

“Thanks,” he said and smiled, softly and almost shyly. “It might be a blessing in disguise too. Removes the temptation to call you.”

 

He tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear, his hands warm and strong brushing against her cheek. Sorscha flinched.

 

“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have— I’m not your boyfriend anymore.”

 

“No,” she said. “No, it’s fine. You didn’t mean it that way.”

 

“I think I might have,” Dorian said. He smiled, this time sadly. “I think… I think I should go soon.”

 

“Wait,” she said as he tried to get up. “Let’s just finish this properly. You ordered dessert, didn’t you?”

 

Dorian’s smile turned into a real grin. “That’s true. You ought get one full free meal out of me before this break up gets official. You’d be a terrible ex-girlfriend if you didn’t try.”

 

  
✖

 

 

“Excuse me, I need some air.”

 

The waiters smiled obligingly at her and opened the door for her. The large balcony of the restaurant overlooked the Glass Palace and, even further in the distance, the old black clock tower like an angry black sentinel on the horizon. It had rained recently, so the smog of dust and car exhausts that clouded the city skyline had been cleaned away and the sky was, for once, cloudless and clear. She could even see the distant hills rolling away in the horizon. It was good fortune, she thought. She could admire the views while she waited.

 

Dorian, forever hounded by paparazzi and gossipmongers, had always made it a point to try and leave locations separately when they could, especially in the bustling heart of Rifthold where the photographers like to camp out for him and other members of the social elite. It wasn’t as much of an issue in the more suburban and distant parts of Greater Rifthold, but in the city centre he was always cautious of attracting too much attention. 

 

It was suffocating, he said, and he didn’t want Sorscha to have to suffer though it and have her face plastered on every magazine and tabloid from here to Wendlyn. His consideration, she knew, though it sometimes stung even with the knowledge: like he was embarrassed to be seen with her when he was so accustomed to gracing headlines and covers with beautiful, rich socialites. 

 

She wasn’t beautiful. Pretty, maybe, in the right light and the right angle, but she knew she wasn’t beautiful the way those girls were. She’d never be turning heads or stopping traffic and she had grown to accept that, even if the world still loved beautiful people. 

 

Still, she understood. She saw how much it weighed him down to be watched and gossiped over like and she knew she didn’t want that—the moments between still evenings watching movies on his laptop where his shoulders would just _drop,_ the weight of a thousand voices hanging off them, his eyes dark and distant and his smile a little too strained. She saw, so she quieted her petty, treasonous insecurities about herself and Dorian and accepted his always early departures. She usually found them a tad annoying, actually, the way Dorian would dart and skulk about corners as though we were some sort of spy. (She didn’t know if he was teasing or not.) 

 

Now it was something of a blessing. She wouldn’t have to share an awkward car ride back home with Dorian too. 

 

He’d called a car for her, he told her. It would come after his. After an acceptable passage of time. Then they really wouldn’t see each other any more at all — it would be like nothing had ever happened, like it was a dream. A romantic summer dream.

 

She shook her head bracing at the chilly wind as she properly stepped outside, away from the decadent walls of the restaurant. There were some chairs and tables strew about with ash trays on them.

 

The balcony wasn’t empty. The restaurant wasn’t particularly busy (it was only a Thursday night and school holidays didn’t affect this sort of establishment because _who brought their kids here?_ ) but it shouldn’t have been surprising someone else might have liked to better enjoy the view too. That the whole reason someone had bothered erecting a restaurant so high up.

 

At least it was only one person. Sorscha didn’t think her rattle nerves could have tolerated a the gaggling remnants of a hen party, sipping champagne and taking photos or a rowdy bunch of rich, beautiful, young friends crowding around tables laughing. No, tonight it was just a woman, looking out at the view overlooking the Avery with a glass of red wine and a cigarette smouldering away on an ashtray. Quiet. Calm. Classy.

 

Her black hair was in a sophisticated updo, held in place by a fabulous silver pin in the shape of a beetle and a few locks framing her face. Her dress was a dark smoke grey, long, and covered in tiny rhinestones around the hem, like she’d trod through starlight. Sorscha gagged a bit at her flowery internal narration. Yet it was undeniable the woman was beautiful. It was putting Sorscha on edge, a tad. It reminded her of the kind of polished beauty that Dorian so exuded, slicked hair hair and tailored suits, and the kinds of beautiful people Dorian was accustomed to associating with, all draped in finery and couture.

 

It made Sorscha all the more aware of the gnawing gap between them. It was the right thing, she told herself, to end things with Dorian. She and him would never have lasted. It was only selfishness to want to keep him by her side and in the end it wouldn’t help either of them.

 

So it was just the two of them, loners, hanging around on a balcony as the wind whipped past at odd intervals, keening softly like white noise and the occasional echo of inescapable traffic drifting up into the air.

 

She decided to sit down. The woman had decided to set herself up in the middle of the balcony and with only four tables out, Sorscha picked the rightmost one, tucked against a potted plant.

 

She was dragging the chair, an abstract and modern steel thing twisted into elegant curves and stark lines that were probably some sort of commentary on social issues Sorscha couldn’t glean, when a voice interrupted her.

 

“Alright down there?”

 

The woman. She had set down her glass and had her cigarette between her fingers. She exhaled. Smoke spiralled up, lit an electric blue by the neon lights piped around  the edge of the balcony, before fading away. In the dying summer heat, the restaurant had set out some fans to keep a nicer breeze going outdoors. The way they were aligned, the smoke blew into her face. The only way to stay upwind would be to sit next to the woman.

 

“I don’t bite, you know.”

 

Sorscha wasn’t sure. The woman was beautiful: fine features and the dramatic contrast to pale skin against night black hair. She looked like a vampire supermodel. Or a supermodel vampire. Either seemed right. Beautiful and a little scary. It was silly to think about things like that but Sorscha was just taken aback.

 

She must have spent too long hesitating, or else her face gave away her worries.

 

“You can stay there if you like too,” the woman said. “Just know I won’t stop smoking.”

 

Sorscha sniffed and cringed. She couldn’t really go home smelling like burning tar and nicotine. People would get the wrong idea. She navigated the chair back in its original place and elected to walk over next to the woman.

 

“Am I that bad?”

 

Sorscha took a moment to realise the woman was speaking to her. “Huh? Me?”

 

“Am I really that bad?” the woman repeated. “You seemed awfully reluctant to go anywhere near me.”

 

“Oh. No. I’m sorry.” Sorscha folded her hands neatly in front of her to stop them from fidgeting and attempted polite eye contact. That was better than just staring at her feet, right? “I just didn’t want to bother you. I’ll be going soon anyway. I’m just waiting for a car.”

 

“You don’t need to be so formal,” the woman said. “You’re not a schoolgirl being scolded by a teacher.”

 

Was that how she looked? She knew she had a bit of a baby face and sometimes she felt like a child playing dress up in the nice clothes Dorian bought her, going to the nice places Dorian liked to take her, perpetually feeling out of her dept but—

 

Oh. The woman was still speaking.

 

She said, “We must be about the same age.”

 

Were they? She looked like she was in her twenties, perhaps. Sorscha knew that, even if it were the case, that a few years shouldn’t have made much of a difference between them. But she and this woman (young lady? Girl?) seemed worlds apart. Sorscha had already seen how far even something as simple as university seemed to make a difference. It was odd considering herself equal to her in any way.

 

She said, “The clock tower really ruins the scenery, don’t you think?”

 

“I think it does too,” Sorscha replied. “Are we allowed to say that?”

 

“This is supposedly a free country.”

 

Sorscha cracked a wan smile. “I suppose it is. Supposedly.”

 

The woman gestured into the view with the hand holding her cigarette. Smoke curled in the wind. “Went in there once on a tour. It was awful. The windows are stained weird and there are mirrors mounted all the way up. The light’s enough to give anyone seizure. Really stuffy in there too. The air’s awful. Had a headache for days.”

 

Smalltalk. There was going to be smalltalk. She could do this. All she had to do was answer questions. Answer questions or just ask the woman to stop. The car would be here soon anyway. She just had to stay here a little longer. Just a few more minutes that stretched out to feel like an eternity. 

 

“The Secret Tomb,” the woman said, at no apparent prompting. She inhaled. The orange tip of her cigarette flared bright again.

 

“Sorry?” Sorscha asked.

 

“It’s a nightclub.” Another puff of smoke. “You ever been?”

 

“No,” Sorscha said. She wondered how old she actually looked. “I’m not really interested in those kinds of things.”

 

“Hmm.” A noncommittal hum. “You know. I saw Dorian Havilliard walk out of there once. Surprised he’d ever go to such a dump, but I suppose everyone enjoys slumming it a little every now and then.”

 

“Is Dorian Havilliard even old enough to go to a nightclub?” Sorscha said with a smile. There was smalltalk. She knew enough about Dorian to pretend she was just one of those people who followed his adventures in the society section of the Rifthold Standard.

 

“You should know,” the woman said, “he was your date here, after all.” She smiled as sweetly as poisoned honey. “That is, unless you had a _different_ arrangement.”

 

Sorscha could feel her ears light up in cold, hot again the bristling chill of the wind.

 

The stranger laughed. “I’m only joking. I’m sure he was your date. Your boyfriend, perhaps.”

 

“Ex-boyfriend,” Sorscha blurted out. Her ears grew even hotter.

 

She chuckled. “Look at you. What a heartbreaker.”

 

Sorscha looked down at the floor. She looked up at the skyline. She looked everywhere but at the stranger.

 

There as a distant tapping, maybe the ashtray shifting about on the table. Sorscha didn’t turn her head to really see. The woman cleared her throat. “How old are you then? Which grade? Judging by the hardback sticking out of your bag, I’m going to say seventeen.”

 

Sorscha flicked her gaze to her bag. True to her word, the top corner of her biology textbook poked up from it. Bringing a textbook to a romantic break up date did, in hindsight, seem like a regrettable decision but the bus ride or car ride or however else it was she was going to get back with was long and she thought she might as well try and be productive before school really started back up. It was embarrassing, really, now that strangers were commenting on it.

 

The stranger was clearly waiting for an answer, a teasing smile on her face as she rested her chin on her hand, elbow propped up again the table, fingers lazily dangling down with a loose grip over her cigarette.

 

Sorscha said, “Sixteen. I have a birthday coming up, though. Soon. So seventeen’s a good enough guess.” It was as good as seventeen anyway. Only a few months.

 

“Oh?” the woman said, something glinting in those dark eyes. “Sixteen and already cracking away at the advanced placement sciences. You _are_ rather clever. Is that what Dorian liked about you? He always liked those books of his.”

 

“How do you know Dorian?” Sorscha tried. That was _if_ this stranger knew Dorian at all. Everyone knew _of_ him, of course. He was the Crown Prince. The possibility of having revealed personal details about his life to some groupie made her faintly queasy.

 

“We went to school together,” she said with a wave of her hand.

 

“You just graduated too?”

 

“He was in the year above me.”

 

So she was younger than Dorian. It was a little hard to tell. With her hair elegantly pinned up, only a few black wisps falling out of place in the breeze, and her flowing evening gown, Sorscha had assumed she was somewhere in her twenties. That was often the intention of teenage girls, though, wasn’t it? She thought it was a little odd. People would spend so long trying to look older and then even longer trying to look young again. Maybe there was just an ideal age everyone wanted to be.

 

The lady— No, _girl_. She was around Sorscha’s age, after all. Younger than Dorian and she’d always considered him a boy. Sometimes a young man. Mostly a boy.

 

“Don’t believe me?” she teased. The unclipped her bag, a sleek black leather thing Sorscha had hardly noticed sitting on the table in the dark, and pulled a card.

 

She presented it to Sorscha with two hands, a polite offering. The tips of her fingers, nails painted a matte grey, covered some of the text and a corner of her photo, but Sorscha recognised it as a student card. Rifthold Peers’ Academy was printed neatly on the top. She nudged it forward for Sorscha to inspect. Sorscha took the card with both hands too, politely, though she didn’t know what to really do with it. She looked at the corners. Still stiff and clean. Posh schools even had fancy student IDs, didn’t they? It was either new or extremely resistant to being worn out. The colours printed on it were still fresh and deep and crisp.

 

The girl observed her with cool distance and tapped her cigarette on the guard rails. Ash tipped over and spiralled down into the wind like the rest of the invisible smog and dust that choked the Rifthold sky in haze. “Kaltain Rompier.” 

 

It took Sorscha a moment to realise that was a name. Another second after that to remember it was the name that was on the ID. One more second, henceforth, to remember her manners.

 

“Oh, uh, I’m Sorscha.”

 

“It’s a pleasure,” she said flatly. She didn’t bother holding out a hand to shake. Sorscha didn’t fault her much for it. Personally, she didn’t want to get the smell of smoke on her own hands and that didn’t help matters.

 

“Smoking’s bad for you,” Sorscha muttered, looking away. Sorscha almost flushed when she realised she’d said it aloud.

 

“No kidding,” the girl said, and took a deep drag. She took pains to blow the smoke out in Sorscha’s direction, against the wind. “I never knew.”

  
“That’s really terrible for your health.”

 

“It’s also terrible for my appetite, which is why I do it. That and the possible addiction thing.”

 

Sorscha tried again. “It’s terrible for your wallet too.”

 

The girl laughed, her shoulders shaking. She exhaled. The tip of the cigarette glowed a fierce orange through the murky dark. “I’ve got plenty of money to burn. Quite literally. Maybe that’s why I do it too.”

 

“You don’t seem very sure.”

 

“About what?”

 

“…Smoking,” Sorscha said eventually, after a pause she spent considering if she was being mocked.

 

Kaltain’s shoulders shook a little, like she was laughing even though Sorscha couldn’t hear anything. Blowing out a puff of smoke, she said. “Where are you from anyway?” 

 

“Fenharrow,” Sorscha replied, looking away.

 

Kaltain snorted, tapping her hand on the rail and sending the ash from her cigarette tumbling down over the side of the bridge, scattering into the snowfall that blanketed the whirring traffic below. “You sound like you’re from Rifthold. Did you grow up in Rifthold?”

 

“I did.”

 

“Then you’re from Rifthold.”

 

She said, with some bite, “I’m from Fenharrow.”

 

Kaltain considered it, staring up at the sky as though it was tiresomely laborious to understand. “So you grew up in Rifthold, but you’re from Fenharrow?”

 

“Yes,” Sorscha replied awkwardly. 

 

“Still a Riftholder, though, then.”

 

“I’m not from Adarlan. I’m from Fenharrow.”

 

“I never _said_ you were from Adarlan,” Kaltain replied, blasé. “I said you were a Rifholder.”

 

“Rifthold is in Adarlan.”

 

“So it is.” Kaltain looked like she was holding back a snicker. “What’s your passport say?”

 

“I don’t have a passport.”

 

Kaltain tapped the ash off her cigarette again. “Dull.”

 

There was a silence. Kaltain took a drag. Smoke spiralled up to the sky again. The lights of the Rifthold skyline flickered — airplane warning lights on the tall buildings, whizzing traffic by the roads.

 

“So then… Fenharrow,” Kaltain conceded at last.

 

Sorscha let herself relax. Her shoulder fell as they un-tensed. The moment they did, Kaltain interjected.

 

“Whereabouts?”

 

“A small village in the South. I doubt you’d know it.”

 

“Is that so?” Kaltain smirked. “I’m from Fenharrow. Why don’t you just try me?”

 

“O-oh?” Sorscha said, trying to eek out more small talk. “Where?”

 

“Bellhaven,” Kaltain said, as if it were perfectly obvious.

 

That seemed natural enough. Bellhaven was a port city, and, in recent times, the most bustling city in Fenharrow – the unofficial capital, cosmopolitan and thriving for business, though the political capital still remained elsewhere. Long ago it had been nothing more than a fishing port, a small city dotted with merchants who conducted their business amongst the ships that flitted in and out of the harbours. Those merchants had since turned Bellhaven into a bustling cityscape, still dotted throughout with charming old buildings and peeling paint in obnoxious colours and timid pastels. She’d seen the pictures. It seemed nice. Still built up, but not quite as claustrophobic as Rifthold. By the sea, too, explaining the ever present orange haze of rust that dotted just about every metal thing on a building.

 

“Suits you,” Sorscha said, at a loss to produce any other reply.

 

Kaltain seemed to bristle, mouth pressing into a tight line around her cigarette. “Maybe.”

 

Sorscha looked away, glancing at the table closest to Kaltain. Only a few things were strewn over it — a packet of cigarettes among them. It still looked nice, branded logo and elegant fonts, art nouveau curls decorating the corners, so she supposed it was an old package or one that wasn’t from Adarlan — pictures of lung cancer and empty gums were the only thing that decorated cigarette boxes here.

 

“That clock tower really is hideous, though,” Kaltain said, breaking the silence, eyes pointing to the offending building, stark obsidian walls reflecting dull bits of the cityscape lights. “And they spend so tax money on repairs for it every year. Ridiculous.”

 

Sorscha recalled the large series of public scandals that had led to the resignation of about three prime minsters when she was a child. “It’s not the most ridiculous thing about this country.”

 

“No,” Kaltain said. “The most ridiculous thing about this country is the currency they keep. ‘Wyverns’. Who thought that was a good idea? Paying for everything in ‘wyverns’. Ugh.”

 

“The coins used to be gold and silver and stamped with wyverns,” Sorscha repeated from rote. She’d just had a test about it in history at school. She was a t least partially stack in flashcard mode, reciting answers out to Luca who’d read them from study notes she made. 

 

“Yes, yes,” Kaltain said. “I know. Wyverns. The sigil of the Havilliard family.”

 

“House Havilliard,” Sorscha corrected like the dutiful student, educated in Adarlan all her life on Adarlan kool-aid. She wanted to smack herself for saying it.”

 

Kaltain raised an eyebrow and let the correction stand, mostly by ignoring that it every happened. “I still think it’s ridiculous. Wyverns and coppers. Better than lizard tails, I suppose. But only barely.”

 

“And the currency in Fenharrow makes more sense?” Sorscha said.

 

“That’s correct.” Kaltain gave a small smile. Sorscha didn’t trust it. She didn’t think she was supposed to. “You should know, since you’re from Fenharrow and all.”

 

Despite the baiting, Kaltain appeared to have lost interest in the subject. Sorscha waited for her to prod more, nervous hands wringing the fabric of her dress, but Kaltain just stared out at the skyline, the offending clock tower in particular, and enjoyed her smoking. The wind managed to carry most of the smoke away, but Sorscha could still smell it over everything else. A lifetime of inhaling in the rancid Rifthold air should have made her accustomed to poor air, but cigarette smoke was a particular devil she didn’t like dealing with.

 

When was her car going to get here? How much lead time did Dorian really need to make sure no one thought they were together? (Well, they weren’t _now_ anymore, but…)

 

“So what is it that makes you interesting?” Kaltain said, blunt and without an ounce of hesitation. More than anything, the tone was boredom and, if you dug, maybe just a hint of idle curiosity.

 

“Nothing,” Sorscha said. “I’m just me.”

 

Average. Unremarkable. Invisible most of the time. She liked it that way. Usually. She would have loved to be unnoticed tonight as well but that wasn’t going to be happening anytime soon—not when Kaltain kept her in her sights with all the lazy interest of a cat toying with a mouse. Cats didn’t even eat half the things they killed. They just tortured them till death and left them hanging around like trophies or little practical exercises in hunting — even the house cats who’d never have to lift a muscle in their lives.

 

Kaltain was not impressed by her reply.

 

“There _must_ be something about you,” she said. “After all, you managed to steal Dorian’s heart. And break it too, apparently.” She laughed delicately, mouth hidden behind the long elegant fingers of her hand. “You just seem so boring. I don’t really get it. Though, maybe that’s what’s interesting about you. Delightful little paradox.”

 

The back of Sorscha’s neck tingled. A chill that didn’t have anything to do with the stale wind. “What do you want?”

 

“What do _you_ want?” Kaltain said, with a wide smirk. “I can get it for you.”

 

“No,” Sorscha said. “What do you _want_?” 

 

Kaltain stifled another snicker. “I’d like to know a little more about you. You and Dorian.”

 

Sorscha eyed her, suspicious and wary.  She took half a step back. Kaltain lounged against the guard rail, elbows proper up.

 

“Nothing in this world is free, of course. So, quid pro quo, what would you like in return?” Kaltain smiled. Her white teeth gleamed even in the dark. “Think it and it shall appear.”

 

“I don’t think I want anything from you,” Sorscha said.

 

A shrug. “The offer stays on the table.”

 

She took a napkin lying on a table and scribbled a phone number onto it. She passed it to Sorscha, tucking it into her hand until their palms pressed skin to skin.

 

Sorscha thought it very much seemed like a different situation. Everything was surreal.

 

“That’s power right there,” she said, gesturing to the number with a smirk. “Why don’t you keep hold of that? Might come in handy. That is, if I still think you’re interesting enough when you call.” Her index finger wagged from side to side, mimicking a broken clock hand, stuck twitching between eleven and twelve. “Tick tock.”

 

Her phone beeped just then, very sharp and very high pitched. It must have been a custom tone because Sorscha had never heard it on any phone she’d seen before. Then again, Sorscha hadn’t been around that many smartphones. She guessed it was a text tone because Kaltain only glanced at the screen before putting the phone back in her handbag.

 

“I’ve got to go now,” she with an infuriating grin. “My chariot awaits.”

 

She strode away, bare shoulders brushed against Sorscha as she went on her way. Sorscha felt the luxurious semi-train of her dress trail over her calves. Her heels clicked as she went.

 

Everywhere Kaltain touched felt wrong. The waitstaff told her that her taxi had arrived. Sorscha told them to hold it. She needed to wash her hands.

 

  
✖

 

 

Sorscha didn’t do anything with the phone number. She happily forgot about it, actually, and the days past normally and quietly with all the comforting invisibility she’d grown accustomed to in life. Everything seemed like a distant memory, a faraway dream that didn’t happen. Dorian didn’t call, couldn’t call, and Sorscha immersed herself in getting back into the flow of school after a whole summer of— She didn’t want to think about that.

 

She was busy and it kept her too occupied to worry about anything like Kaltain’s dark smile on a balcony sixty four stories up in a restaurant that she’d probably never visit again in her life.

 

Normalcy, she’d thought, without princes or love or consequences any more terrible than applying to the wrong university, had come back to her. Normalcy, that heavy blanket no one could see past.

 

Normalcy, as it turned out, didn’t want to stay.

 

She was elbow deep in reading through a science textbook when the phone rang. Being the only person at home, she picked it up.

 

“Hello?”

 

“Hi, Sorscha? Yes, perfect. Okay, so if you could help me out here…”

 

“Luca?”

 

“Yep, that’s me, so listen I’m going to need you to do something really big for me…”

 

“Luca.”

 

“Hey, you wouldn’t happen to have five thousand Wyverns lying around, would you?”

 

She spat out her drink. Thankfully, most of it landed back in her mug.

 

“I’ll take that as a no.”

 

“What do you even need that amount of money _for_?”

 

“I may have gotten in a little bit of trouble.”

 

“What _kind_ of trouble?”

 

“I might be calling you from a police station…”

 

“Luca.”

 

“It’s not a big deal. Probably. Yet.”

 

“ _Luca_.”

 

“So I might have tried to steal a motorcycle?”

 

“ _What?”_

 

“I didn’t like, _steal_ steal it. It was just a dare, okay? And it belonged to—” His voice deteriorated into mumbled, maybe out of embarrassment or maybe because of the poor quality of the phone line. Sorscha was used enough to figuring it out and deciphered the gist of it.

 

“You tried to ‘steal’ your girlfriend’s cousin’s ex-boyfriend’s motorcycle?” she repeated, mouth dry. “As a joke.”

 

“His sense of humour was not as great as we thought it was going to be.”

 

“ _Luca_ …” It was a warning.

 

“You can’t tell Dads,” Luca said hastily. “If you just pay the bail everything’ll be fine.”

 

Malakai and Emrys would probably kill him, that was true. That was even if they had enough money on hand to bail him out. Ordinarily it wouldn’t be too much of a problem, but the fridge had broken down and then the washing machine and then Malakai needed to replace the door to his garage workshop or risk bringing his business to a standstill and the cheque for the advance of Emrys’s next book sale wouldn’t bank in to the account for another week. What was the family bank balance now? Could it even survive Luca’s mishap? What would be the overdraft charges be if they had to go into the negative, even for a week or two, to handle the situation.

 

“How am I supposed to get that kind of money?”

 

“Just— Just talk to—”

 

Was he actually serious?

 

  
✖

 

 

“How is your girlfriend’s cousin going to get the money?”

 

“I don’t know, okay, Sorscha, but I think she’ll have an idea and I’m running out of time here. You’re my best bet. Come on, sis. Just— _Please_ try and do something. We’re going to try and call her cousin and you just— Just come up with a back up plan. Or a real plan, actually, because I’m not sure her cousin can actually pull through on this. Don’t tell her I said, that, though, she’ll kill me. Shit, okay, gonna go.”

 

“Luca, wait! Luca, I don’t think I can—”

 

The phone clicked. He’d hung up.

 

Unbelievable.

 

Groaning, she knocked over a collection of papers on her desk. They tumbled down the side, tipping over boxes of knick-knacks. Even without being present Luca was making a mess of her room again. She got down on the floor to collect the rabble.

 

A matchbook and a business card from the Sky Dining in Rifthold Tower. Dorian had told her to keep it, if only as a souvenir to show off considering how scarce reservations were. Next to it, that blasted napkin. A phone number.

 

Kaltain Rompier.

 

Was this really the only bet they had?

 

Sorscha shoved the napkin the side and contemplated throwing it in the bin. She remembered Kaltain’s dark smile. Burning it, then, might actually better. She remembered the way skin itched in all the places Kaltain had swiped her hand. Alright then, burning it and getting the ashes as far away from her as possible.

 

She didn’t throw it away, though.

 

She cleared up the rest of the mess and left the napkin on the floor, neatly written numbers staring up at her.

 

No, she told herself. Not yet. There were other things she could try.

 

  
✖

 

 

There was nothing left she could try.

 

She’d exhausted every option, dug through every corner of the house for spare change, every sock drawer, every piggy bank and there was no way she’d have enough money.

 

Kaltain’s phone number was on the napkin in handwriting that was clear, neatly elegant with just a touch of curl to the slanted characters, like they were italicised. Her name and phone number. There was nothing to think about, no difficult mess of lines to attempt to decipher. Everything was plain as day. The steps to take seemed obvious. Read number. Type in number. Call Kaltain for favour. It seemed easy but Sorscha found she could not do any part of it.

 

How was she going to do this? Calling the pizza delivery place was stressful enough and they were strangers who’s _job_ it was to listen to her requests. Trying to wrangle a favour out of Kaltain, however hard she’d hinted it’d be more of a business transaction than anything else, was going to be on a whole other level.

 

She typed in the number.

 

Her finger hovered over the dial button. She swallowed. She pressed it. She heard the dial tone and then ringing. Sorscha held her breath.

 

The dial tone crackled out into noise.

 

“Hello.”

 

Sorscha almost dropped her phone. What was she doing?

 

The voice on the other side of the line repeated, with some annoyance, “Hello?”

 

“Hi,” Sorscha said. “Hi, um, is this Kaltain? Kaltain Rompier?”

 

“If you got this number, then it shouldn’t be anyone else.”

 

Sorscha bit her tongue. “It’s Sorscha. You know, from the other night.”

 

“Dorian’s ex,” Kaltain said. Her voice was smooth as sweet as poisoned honey. “I recall.”

 

Sorscha was thankful she remembered her name, she supposed, though part of her was wondering how much easier things would be if Kaltain hung up right now and refused her. She could just tell Malakai and Emrys. She could, and save herself this stress and guilt and worry, but that would just earn more stress and guilt and worry about their money.

 

“Is your offer still on the table?”

 

“It might be,” Kaltain purred. Sorscha didn’t know why she bothered when she had all the leverage. Maybe it was meant as a taunt. Sorscha was honestly out of her depth here.

 

“I have a favour to ask.”

 

“Before I decide anything, why don’t you go ahead and ask?”

 

“My brother’s in some trouble. I’d—” (not need, she couldn’t say need, that was too desperate and Kaltain would no doubt drain her for all she was worth if she used a word like _need_ ) “—like to get him out of it.”

 

Kaltain hummed noncommittally, a prompt for her to continue. Would texts have been better? Even without having to look Kaltain in the eye as she talked, there wasn’t much to hide behind. She felt exposed. That just seemed to be a talent Kaltain had and it extended all the way down to her telephone presence. Then again Sorscha texted so slowly it might be an embarrassment to negotiate that way. 

 

“He got arrested. Crashed a motorcycle. He hasn’t got a licence because he’s too young and—” She took a deep breath.

 

“And?”

 

“The motorcycle was stolen.”

 

Kaltain made another humming, considering noise. “How old is your brother?”

 

“Fifteen.”

 

“I can work with that.”

 

Sorscha’s heart dropped in her chest and she didn’t know whether it was because of relief or terrible, terrible regret.

 

“I need—” Ah, it was too late to correct that “—him out before our—” she really couldn’t stutter at a time like this, this was absolutely no time to be questioning things like family and giving Kaltain more ammunition to target her vulnerabilities “—parents find out.”

 

“And when would that be?”

 

“Tonight. 11 o’clock. He needs his bail posted.”

 

“Well you certainly like to be specific,” Kaltain said. “Demanding, some would say, but I prefer things to be clear. What’s his name?”

 

“Luca.”

 

Scribbling. A pen on paper. “Sure. I’ll do it, but you’re going to have to give me more than just his first name—” 

 

“I have to go, our parents are coming around I need to—”

 

Kaltain sighed. “I’ll figure it out.”

 

She hung up. Sorscha scrambled for the door. How was she going to stall?

 

 

✖

 

 

It was a Thursday night, but it was also the middle of summer holidays, so Sorscha managed to convince Emrys and Malakai that she had plans to meet up with Luca and his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s friends for dinner. They were pleased enough to know she was getting some air out of the house considering they’d had to force her into making grocery runs just to separate her from her school books. (She was nervous, that was all. This year was supposed to be important.)

 

It took a few bus transfers to figure out but, armed with a scrawled list of directions she’d copied from the internet when she was at home, she made it to the address of the police station Kaltain had texted her. (A text Sorscha had waiting what seemed like a nail biting eternity for, making idle smalltalk with Malakai and Emrys and hoping they chalked Luca’s absence up to his usual propensity yo hang out until the very final stroke of his admittedly loose curfew.)

 

She found Kaltain as soon as she stepped through the door. 

 

Kaltain was leaning against a wall, handbag hanging in the crook of her elbow, both hands busy typing away on her smartphone, one Sorscha wasn’t even sure had been released in Adarlan yet. (She’d seen pictures online, mostly because Luca had been excited about it, rattling on about how unfair it was Wendlyn got them all first never mind the fact that Wendlyn was where they were all invented and _made_.)

 

“I take back the comment about you being specific,” Kaltain said, not bothering to look up. Whether it was exceptional peripheral vision or some supernatural sense that made her notice Sorscha’s otherwise invisible presence, she’d never know for sure. She didn’t want to ask for confirmation either.  “I can’t believe you expected me to solve the problem only knowing some kid called ‘Luca’ stole a motorcycle. I didn’t even know his last name.”

 

She— Actually, she really _hadn’t_ given Kaltain much to go on. She’d managed to do it anyway. She debated between feeling grateful or scared.

 

Kaltain frowned, crossing her arms. “I assume it’s the same as yours?”

 

Oh. Right. The surname.

 

“It is now, yes,” Sorscha said.

 

“That’s wonderfully helpful, except I don’t know your last name either.”

 

Ah, that was— Kaltain was right. Sorscha was still a little awkward about saying the name aloud. It felt a little like losing grip of the family she once had even if it was really about reaching out to her new one. Malakai and Emrys were kind and good and she loved them so why wouldn’t she want to share a name with them so all the world could know they were a family? Did it matter? She’d been through a few of them in her runs through the foster system. It seemed hard to keep track.

 

Kaltain’s frowned deepened. “Fine. Whatever. I’ll figure it out later.”

 

Sorscha realised she’d been staying quiet, contemplating the whole time. She would have felt guilty had she not remembered who she was talking to. 

 

What was she supposed to say or do now, anyway?

 

“Luca…”

 

“It’s been handled,” Kaltain replied, clipped and curt. It still didn’t give Sorscha anymore information about what she was supposed to do.

 

“Is he alright?”

 

“The police didn’t seem to bang him up, no. I don’t think there was anything written in the reports about him being injured in anyway. Well, except his pride, of course. But that doesn’t get recorded for posterity.”

 

Sorscha could not tell if it was supposed to be a joke or a taunt or just a straightforward transmission of information. 

 

So she stayed quiet, standing next to Kaltain and leaning against the wall too, trying to make it look like she knew what was going on. She made sure to keep appropriate distance from Kaltain: just close enough for an outside observer to tell they were there together as people who’d known each other beforehand and made plans but far enough that it confirmed their status as acquaintances who were both here for an agreed upon thing rather than anything more personal. That was her intention, anyway. Then it was just quiet again: dull background noise of people walking through the station and Kaltain’s fingers tapping against touchscreen glass.

 

“Adopted?” Kaltain said, still looking at her phone, scrolling though a large passage of text in font was too small for Sorscha to read.

 

“Huh?”

 

“You,” Kaltain said. “Or your brother. Either or. You don’t look alike. Nothing even remotely similar about your noses.”

 

“Is there supposed to be?”

 

“It’s just a saying.” Kaltain smiled a little. “A saying from Fenharrow. One would think you’d know it, being from there yourself and all.”

 

Sorscha turned away, feeling her face heat up from a mixture of offence and embarrassment. She patted her self on the cheeks, trying to shake of Kaltain’s words and recompose herself, like splashing imaginary water on her face. The only saving grace was that Kaltain was probably too enraptured by whatever it was on her phone to look up at her. Maybe she should have been offended at that too.

 

Whatever response she prepared died in her throat. The background noise of the police station mixed with the steady tap tap tap of Kaltain’s fingers against her phone screen, broken up with the occasional swipe instead.

 

After a length, Kaltain ventured.

 

“So are you?” Kaltain waved her hand through the air in a noncommittal way, neither here nor there, that implied a vague interest but mostly boredom. “Your options are yes, no, and mind your own business.”

 

“Huh?” Oh. Right. Adoption. “Yes. I mean, yeah, yes. Yes now. Now, yes. Emrys and Malakai were my foster parents for a while but they decided they’d adopt me.”

 

Kaltain raised an eyebrow with a tiny smirk. “You don’t seem so sure.”

 

“What?”

 

“Nothing,” Kaltain said and snickered. Then she schooled her face back to neutrality. “No. I mean you don’t sound very pleased about the whole thing.”

 

“I’m happy,” Sorscha insisted. “I’m just…getting used to it.”

 

“I think it’s interesting you don’t mind calling him your brother but you have trouble calling them your parents,” Kaltain said. “Is it a—” she gestured over to them vaguely “—thing?”

 

“Huh?”

 

“Because they’re both men. They sound like men’s names anyway. Wendlyn names. Who can tell?”

 

Sorscha blinked.

 

Then.

 

“Oh.” Sorscha’s eyes widened. “Oh! No. No it’s not that. I just— I never had a brother so getting one didn’t seem to be that much of a change. But I _had_ parents. And, well, it doesn’t seem— That is, I can’t really—”

 

“Bored now,” Kaltain said. “Got it. That’s fine, stop there. Don’t need to hear your whole life story.” She sighed. “All this for a last name.”

 

“Sorry,” Sorscha mumbled. Kaltain didn’t seem to hear her, not even tearing her eyes away from her phone for a second.

 

“They dropped the charges, by the way,” Kaltain said, tapping away at the phone and in a tone that seemed more appropriate for discussing the weather at a bus stop. “No criminal record. Just a bit of a youthful prank gone wrong. Service. Consider it a free service.”

 

Sorscha was sure it was anything but. She eyed Kaltain warily and Kaltain had the gall to look offended by it, as though she hadn’t just quietly persuaded a police officer to look the other way.

 

“Honestly it is,” Kaltain said, shrugging. “Free service.”

 

“You paid his bail already?”

 

“Naturally,” Kaltain said, and scoffed. “What kind of second rate negotiator do you think I am?”

 

“All of it?”

 

Kaltain sighed, finally putting away her phone. “Yes, all of it. If you’re worried, don’t be. He should be coming out of holding any moment now. Last time I checked, they were just fetching his things.”

 

“It’s all been paid?” Sorscha repeated. “I haven’t even told you anything.”

 

“Consider it a show of good faith. The service too.” Kaltain smiled dangerously. “I expect you to hold up your end of our arrangement.”

 

Sorscha swallowed. She hoped Kaltain hadn’t seen it, but she didn’t hope too hard. Kaltain’s eyes sparkled with a dark amusement. Sorscha heavily questioned all the life choices that had brought her here in this moment.

 

After a few frantic heartbeats and the sound of her own conscience railing against her for ever associating with someone like Kaltain Rompier, she blinked and tried to compose herself. She righted her posture. Kaltain half-copied it, standing up a little straighter before leaning forward and tilting her head in her direction so they’re eyes were about level. She was reminded how tall Kaltain actually was compared to her. It was cruel parody of the sort of posture people took when talking to children next to them while the whole family was out at the zoo enjoying an outing and a change of pace. Her face had the same bland amusement and vague condescension on it with none of the kindness one might expect to find in the real case. Definite taunting. Not even subtle. Sorscha would have been offended at how poorly Kaltain regarded her if she wasn’t to busy pee herself. 

 

“So what’s the rest of it?” Kaltain said in a tone someone would use when asking their niece or nephew if they wanted ice cream after seeing the giraffes. “Half now, half after. That seems like a fair show of faith.”

 

“The rest of it?” Sorscha repeated.

 

Kaltain half glared at her, keeping a pleasant plastic smile on her face. “Don’t play coy. This is business and I have better things to do.”

 

Sorscha stood her ground. “If you have better things to do perhaps you don’t need me after all.”

 

The corner of Kaltain’s lips curved upwards. Though her face was beautiful, the smile was anything but. “Have we got ourselves a game player, here?”

 

She swallowed. It was too late to consider if any of this was a good idea or not. All that mattered was getting through it. “Maybe.”

 

Kaltain let out a small laugh. Saying her features softened would have been an exaggeration, but her smile did get a little less cruel. “Hurry up and name your price.”

 

Sorscha’s mind blanked out. 

 

“Just this. This was it.”

 

“That’s all?” Kaltain said. To her credit, her eyes barely widened with surprised. She looked at Sorscha like she was a nuisance, the way Sorscha looked at a three for two offer on chocolate at the grocery store as a pain because she knew it was better value for money to get all three even though she’d probably end up eating more than she wanted. No that was bad. She shouldn’t be trying to project anything about herself on Kaltain. Sympathising with her was going to bring ruin, wouldn’t it?

 

She needed to stop thinking so hard about this. Any of this.

 

When neither of the said anything for a while, Kaltain half-laughed half-scoffed again and tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Well, aren’t you a little cheap? I shouldn’t be complaining, though. Alright then. We’ll meet in a week’s time.”

 

She held out her hand. Reluctantly, Sorscha shook it.


	2. make parade of our riches

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaltain drinks pretentious coffee and makes even more pretentious statements. Sorscha finds herself unexpectedly entertained despite the obnoxiousness.

 

 

Kaltain didn’t stick around long. As soon as the doors that blocked off the detention centre swung open and she spotted Luca’s mop of curly brown hair in a tangled bird’s nest on top of his head, she turned to say, “Thank you” one more time to Kaltain only to find an empty column of air next to her. She flexed her hands and something tumbled out of them—a piece of paper. With Luca rapidly approaching, she snatched it up from the ground and stuffed it in her pocket.

 

“Sorscha, oh my god, thank you,” Luca said, gripping her shoulders. He pulled her into a squeezing hug. “Thank you _so_ much. Dads would have killed me if they knew what I did to the car. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

 

“It’s okay, Luca. That’s what family is for, right?”

 

Sorscha hadn’t lived with Emrys and Malakai as long as Luca had. Even though her adoption papers were pending, it still didn’t feel quite comfortable to call either of them Dad the way Luca did. Maybe she’d get used to it?

 

“How did you even manage this?” he said.

 

“Are you saying you didn’t expect me to come through after giving that terrible phone call?”

 

He shrugged and gave a sheepish grin, dimples in his cheeks. “I was hoping. So anyway, how did you do it?”

 

The deflection had failed. She inhaled and said as casually as she could, “I asked a friend.”

 

“Ooo,” Luca cooed. “That rich guy you’ve been seeing all summer?”

 

“What?” Sorscha tripped over air and into a wall, and then got up, brushing herself off like it had never happened. Luca seemed to ignore her gaffe too, maybe because he’d grown accustomed to it. “I haven’t been seeing anyone.”

 

“Sure,” Luca drawled.

 

Sorscha considered telling him they’d broken up, but that would have meant admitting they were even going out in the first place which would have been admitting Luca was right and _that_ was just unacceptable. “I really haven’t.”

 

“I’ll pay him back,” Luca said.

 

“You don’t have to,” Sorscha said, which she hoped Luca would understand as _really please don’t_. Kaltain wouldn’t deserve it anyway. And, technically, she had been more than compensated already.

 

“I have to pay someone back. I’ll make up for it. I promise. I messed up. Thanks for covering for me.”

 

“You should,” Sorscha said. “Apologise to the man who’s motorcycle you stole, at least.”

 

“That might be a little much. But I’ll fix things with the guy who owns the place it was stolen from!”

 

“Luca.”

 

“Look, it doesn’t matter alright? It’s been smoothed out. Bastard didn’t even file charges. We’re just going to go on and act like nothing happened, okay? It’s like a truce. No one will mess with anyone else again. I promise.”

 

“ _Luca_.”

 

“I do! I promise.” He rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Let me meet him sometime. I’ll make sure to check him out for you.” 

 

"Who?"

 

“Your boyfriend.”

 

“I don’t have a boyfriend.” Not _anymore_ but that was beyond the point. “If I did, it shouldn’t be any of your business.” _I’m the one who’s older anyway_ , she wanted to add, even if it was by barely a year.

 

“Yeah right. It’s a brotherly duty, you know?”

 

Sorscha sighed. At least she wouldn’t have to deal with that.

 

* * *

 

The bus ride back was agonising. When the finally made it home, Sorscha collapsed on the bed. She heard Emrys, Malakai and Luca talking through the too thin walls of their home: where he’d been, if he’d been good, what Sorscha had been doing with him and if she’d kept him in line. The usual.

 

Her phone buzzed. Kaltain, naturally. The only other person who would text her, apart from family, was Dorian and he was— Well, it’d be best if she didn’t thin too much about him, now wouldn’t it?

 

_Was I too subtle?_

 

Sorscha threw her phone back down on the duvet. It buzzed again. Groaning, she read checked it once more.

 

 _Check your pocket if you lost the one in your hand_.

 

Her pocket? She looked, both in her jeans and then in her hoodie and then her coat, but found nothing. She panicked. She threw up her duvet. Checked over, under, behind the bed. Her phone buzzed again. She flew to it.

 

 _Psych_.

 

Of all the—

 

More buzzing. She wondered if keeping it on silent most of the time was better than the obnoxious default text tone she couldn’t seem to change.

 

_But, seriously, if you lost it I’ll just text you the details._

 

Then what was even the point of passing her a piece of paper in the first place?

 

Her phone buzzed. Yes, again. Without so much as a prompt, Kaltain obliged her with an answer. It would have been impressive if it wasn’t so damn creepy.

 

 _So much for high drama_. _You really know how to ruin a fun time out_.

 

* * *

 

She did find the first piece of paper in the end. The one she’d almost dropped at the police station. It was too late for Kaltain’s tastes, though: several days after the fact. And besides, she’d only found it after she spilled tea all over her notes and tried to salvage the waterlogged paper. (She wrote everything in pencil, at least, so the actual information was not damaged. Everything had vaguely artsy, vintage feel to it, though, now that it’d all be tea-stained brown at random intervals.)

 

The address Kaltain had given her was just a message on her phone but it somehow made Sorscha’s pocket feel heavier than that. It was even worse than the terrible weight her phone number had been because this new piece of paper came with a gnawing sense of guilt.

 

She didn’t even realise that the address had been given to her until Kaltain had walked away. After they shook hands, Sorscha had balled hers into tight fists, shaking and trembling, partly over-whelmed, partly offended, partly terrified. When she opened them, she found a piece of paper, neatly folded. Kaltain had passed it to her, it seemed, when they were shaking hands, like smoothly tipping the bellboy with a fistful of money. Like money tucked between a handshake in a movie. 

 

Kaltain probably _could_ do it with a wad of cash. She seemed like she had ample practice. Luca had tried to do it once with her after seeing a particularly cool scene between two spies on a TV show. They’d done it with coins that clattered to the floor after they couldn’t quit work out how to tuck their palms together. Come to think of it, Kaltain could probably do it with coins too. The whole gamut of surreptitiously passing objects via handshakes: Kaltain probably had mastered that off at rich kid manipulation school or wherever it was people learned these things.

 

It became even more infuriating to figure out how Kaltain had passed her the note when she realised she’d _seen_ Kaltain’s hand before she shook it—palm open and bare. Kaltain’s shirt didn’t even have long sleeves. When did her other hands get involved? Where had the paper come from?

 

She needed to stop worrying about this so much. It was a piece of paper with an address on it and a horrific stink of guilt. It didn’t _matter_ how Kaltain had passed it to her and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been texted to her or slipped into her back pocket. Kaltain probably did this all deliberately to mess with whoever she was dealing with. Intimidation and taunting. She seemed very fond of taunting. Sorscha would need to stand her ground. She could do that. She could try.

 

Then maybe she’d feel less terrible about this whole mess, spilling her stories about Dorian for payment like a gossip monger to a trashy tabloid.

 

She told herself Dorian would have just done the same thing for her. Paid Luca’s bail, discreetly convinced the parties involved to calm down and reconsider charging Luca, resolve the situation nice and peacefully. Kaltain had did that all, technically, but she also had the feeling that Dorian doing it all for her would have somehow felt much less…dirty. 

 

But Dorian was somewhere deep in Oakwald where the trees could still blot out regular cell signal and Chaol was probably guarding the satellite phone to stop him from taking any calls from her for the sake of proper and clean closure in their relationship. Chaol was like that. He liked her well enough, when they met and even agreed she had a good effect on Dorian. But Dorian was always his first concern and, right now, what Dorian needed was a clean break. That was what his whole year was supposed to be about anyway: finding himself.

 

It was for the best.

 

* * *

 

She didn’t know what it was she was expecting. Something more dramatic? A secluded booth at the back of a restaurant, people dressed in suits, stocky men at every door way like something out of an organised crime film. Maybe that was giving herself too much credit. At the heart of everything, she reminded herself, she was really just a girl going to talk to another girl about her ex-boyfriend. When you framed it in those terms and removed the whole brother almost in jail for automobile theft angle, it really was just that innocuous.

 

So why shouldn’t the setting be just as harmless?

 

Still, when she’d discovered the address Kaltain scrawled on that piece of paper was a coffee shop, she had expected more…mystique. It was an independent little store, so part of Sorscha had still been holding out for a secret passageway behind a display shelf. This was just exactly what it appeared to be: an independent coffee shop on a semi-busy high street, filled with the soft background hum of sparse customers during an off hour. Nothing remarkable at all.

 

The place had a vague hipster charm to it. She would have assumed Kaltain liked classier, less bohemian places, but what would she really know? Her knowledge of Kaltain extended as far as first impressions and the half-hour they’d spent waiting around for cars and people who stole cars (well motorcycles, but that was beyond the point). 

 

It had a _waiting_ zone, though. That had to mean something. 

 

“Oh good, you’re here,” Kaltain said. Her phone screen clicked to black and she sat up from the wooden bench opposite the entrance and waved over a server who ushered them to a table near the back. “It would be an awful pain having to track you down otherwise.”

 

She said it with such a casual lethargy, Sorscha almost didn’t realise it could have been a threat.

 

“Sorry I’m late.”

 

“You’re not, technically,” Kaltain said. “But as they say, when you’re early, you’re on time and when you’re on time, you’re late. Of course, when you’re late, you’re fired.” 

 

She smiled, winsome, oozing with practiced charm that drove a discomforting tingle down the hair on the back of Sorscha’s neck.

 

Kaltain was dressed nicely (as she probably always dressed). The summer air hadn’t quite begun to take on the autumn chill, but there was occasional breeze that bit, cold, into your neck as you walked. She wore a light scarf, all white lace and shiny satin accents, to deal with that. A collared shirt, a cardigan, the smart-casual works, complete with sensible shoes: the sort of clothes a summer intern at a trendy, fashionable start-up might wear. Sorscha highly doubted Kaltain worked, though. (Or maybe not. Life was all about placements and CV padding now, wasn’t it?)

 

Sorscha hadn’t known what to wear for the event, fussing over her wardrobe the night before in a bizarre parody of all the times she’d done the same thing for Dorian. But she told herself Kaltain didn’t have any place judging her — that wasn’t any part of their deal — and the venue she picked seemed causal enough so she went out with a light cotton jacket over a dress and sneakers. So far, Kaltain hadn’t remarked on anything.

 

They sat down at the table and ordered drinks. Sorscha’s eyes skimmed over the right column of the menu, wondering just how overpriced coffee would be, but Kaltain blocked off that whole line of the menu with her own and said she’d handle any ‘transaction costs and reasonable expenses related to the realisation of their agreement’. In the end, Sorscha just pointed to a random item when the waiter came to take their orders. It didn’t matter. She didn’t feel like she could particularly keep anything down.

 

They got their drinks in prompt time. Sorscha thanked the waiter, a young man with an undercut and a scar through his right eyebrow. (Most definitely a hipster coffee house.) Kaltain said her thanks too, but didn’t look in his direction, hands going straight for the drinks. Was this a usual haunt or had she just picked somewhere discreet where no one would remark on them being seen together? There wasn’t much of a crowd in the shop but, even in summer, it seemed to be going through one of its off hours.

 

“In the interests of transparency,” Kaltain began, “I’ll begin by outlining the exact specifications of our agreement.”

 

“Transparency?” she echoed.

 

Kaltain frowned, possibly at the thought of having to explain herself or possibly at the thought Sorscha thought so _lowly_ of _her_. “If a deal’s a deal, the details need to be hammered out. How else will everyone know what’s they’re accountable for.”

 

“That’s very…thorough of you,” Sorscha admitted. She did not admit that she appreciated that kind of eye for detail. That would have been too much and probably do terrible things to the already smug smile on Kaltain’s face.

 

“I aspire to a certain level of professionalism,” Kaltain said. “Never too early to start.” She folded her hands neatly in front of her, fingers laced over fingers, pressed, square and solid, against the table like she’d just finished shuffling a folder full of sensitive redacted documents. “Three meetings, this one inclusive, of a duration I’m free to decide. I reserve right to change venue as an when I like. Fair?”

 

Just three. She could do it. Hope swelled high in her chest. She wouldn’t have to reveal any of Dorian secret’s. Just three meetings and she’d be free. No time limits to them, so Sorscha wouldn’t be able to stall in circles around a clock she could watch countdown but still. Only three. If Kaltain’s propensity to boredom was any indication, they wouldn’t be too hard to endure.

 

“Just three?” Sorscha repeated.

 

“I’m a busy girl,” Kaltain said. “Diminishing marginal returns and all. If I can’t learn what I want by meeting three, then it’s not worth my time to pursue the matter anymore. My own fault too, really. I’ll be the one asking the questions.”

 

“I’m just surprised you think three is all you need,” Sorscha said, straining to keep her voice flat and level. She tried to be as disinterested as possible.

 

“Are you concerned about being fair? That’s cute,” Kaltain cooed. 

 

Sorscha’s fingers twitched. “I just don’t want you to go back on your word when you find out you didn’t get what you wanted.”

 

“I’m petty and childish,” Kaltain said, “but not _that_ petty and childish. You don’t have anything to worry about. Hmm, probably.”

 

The _probably_ lingered in the air. Sorscha swallowed.

 

Kaltain’s fingers drummed idly at her rim of her drink. They made no sound. Sorscha wondered how soft the pads of her fingers were. She’d wager they’d never had to wash a dish in their whole existence. 

 

Kaltain made a sound like the first beat of a laugh. It was sharp, like a bell that chimed once before someone tried to stop it, hands pressing against the perfect cold metal to bury the ring. “I’m not _that_ sore a loser, you know. All appearances to the contrary.”

 

“Aren’t you?” Sorscha said. She licked her lips. They were dried and chapped and she wondered why they were when the wind outside wasn’t enough to beat anything out of shape.

 

“It’s best not to waste time digging when there’s nothing to be found,” Kaltain said. “Dorian’s had plenty of ex-girlfriends. You just seem interesting. If my instincts were wrong, then I’ll just have to cut my losses and move on.”

 

“After all the money you spent?”

 

Kaltain raised an eyebrow and gave a knowing smile. “In business, if you expect to bat a hundred every time, you’ll never win. The most important thing is being able to cut losses and take damages in stride.”

 

“And it wouldn’t bother you?”

 

Kaltain shrugged. “Business is just business. Besides, you’re pretty cheap, considering.” Then, as a distant afterthought, “No offence.”

 

Sorscha swallowed again. She did not bite her lip. That would be too much, she told herself. Reign it in. “None taken. Really. Just three, then.”

 

“Three,” Kaltain confirmed. She crooked her fingers, beckoning a challenge. “Unless you want to try your hand and haggling?”

 

Sorscha shook her head, curls bouncing left and right, flickering in front of her eyes. She brushed them out of the way,wondering how much else of her braid had come loose in the vigorous objection. “No, no. Three is fine.”

 

Kaltain’s teeth gleamed white like fangs as she smiled. “Excellent. So then. All clear?”

 

Sorscha nodded.

 

“We should get started.”

 

“Wait,” Sorscha said. The interruption made Kaltain’s hands jerk just shy of picking up her drink. Liquid splashed against the rim of the cup but didn’t spill out onto the saucer. “You said you wanted me to name my price, right? ‘The rest of it’?”

 

“I did,” Kaltain said. “That was yesterday. I thought we had closed the terms of our arrangement nicely already.”

 

“I have one more condition.”

 

“I’d be careful there.” She leaned closer to Sorscha, fingers slinking around the edges of her coffee cup. “It’s hardly good manners to keep changing a deal.”

 

“You won’t tell anyone else about me and Dorian,” she said. She was careful not to phrase it like a request. It had to be resolute. It had to be firm. It had to brook no room for argument.

 

Kaltain huffed, rolling her eyes. “What rank amateur do you take me for? Some trashy reporter? I am a _lady_. Discretion is assured. _My_ discretion is assured. When we’re done, no one will even have to know we talked about a thing.”

 

Sorscha wondered how anyone could prize idle chatter about Dorian Havilliard enough to pay bail for a random stranger and bribe away any charges or potential of a criminal record. Far be it her place to question the good fortune, though. Luca was safe, the motorcycle owner had been compensated and all she had to do was talk a little to please Kaltain and be on her way. It seemed to good to be true and it made her nervous.

 

“Having a lot of money is quite nice, isn’t it?” Kaltain idly stirred her drink. Sorscha hadn’t seen her add anything to it to stir. She just broke apart the foam. The latte art the barista had done, a series of leafs in the wind, scattered into indistinct waves of white and brown. “Saves you a lot of trouble. Without your family’s unfortunate cash flow problem, you might needn’t’ve ever call me.”

 

Sorscha wasn’t even sure if ‘needn’t’ve’ was even a a word but she could tell it was a contraction of ‘needn’t’ and ‘have’ and it seemed legitimate with the silkily way Kaltain purred it. To be honest, Kaltain could have said anything and Sorscha would have been convinced it sounded like fact. It was taking her real concentration to look past Kaltain’s shiny veneer of put-on charm. 

 

“But you didn’t have money, and you weren’t born rich,” Kaltain continued and Sorscha found it much easier to start disliking her and questioning her. She wondered how someone’s manipulations could be so faltering. She wondered whether it was deliberate and what game Kaltain was trying to play, provoking her like that. “So here you are: with me.”

 

“Here I am.”

 

“How that working out for you?”

 

“What?”

 

“We’ll start slow,” Kaltain said with a casual flick of her wrist. “I like quality in my answers and you seem like the person who needs some time to get going. So: warm ups. How’s it working out for you?” 

 

There was a undeniable surreal quality to the whole event: being interviewed like she was on a talk show instead of paying for favours with what amounted to gossip and snitching.

 

“I’m waiting,” Kaltain said, like there was a studio audience that needed to be entertained. She might have been the MC and studio audience all rolled in one. Her sense of self-importance was certainly somewhere on that scale as a minimum.

 

“I’m not sure,” Sorscha said, tentative. “I’m still getting used to things.”

 

“Fair enough, fair enough,” Kaltain said with an airy wave this time. Sorscha half expected her to start jotting down notes. “And how was the trip over here?”

 

“…Fine.”

 

“The weather was alright, then, for you?” 

 

“It was fine. Everything was fine.”

 

“I see.”

 

Sorscha sat on the edge of her seat, back ramrod straight. Her fingers gripped the edges of the table. “Can we not do this?”

 

“‘This’ is the whole foundation of our little agreement.”

 

“I mean, can we skip the smalltalk.”

 

Kaltain leaned back in her seat, against the plush leather cushioned attached to the booth seats. She kicked her legs forwards, stretching them, taking up space. Sorscha shuffled her own out of the way. “And what if the smalltalk is my favourite part?”

 

“Then a deal’s a deal,” Sorscha said, voice tight. “I would have to deal with it.”

 

“Yes.” Kaltain grinned. “You would. So deal with it.”

 

Sorscha resisted the urge to squirm in her seat. Kaltain appraised her from a distance, fingers laced over her coffee like she was enjoying a performance from a local up-an-coming artist, strumming away in the corner with a guitar and a guitar case open, dotted through will coins.

 

Kaltain set her drink down. Sorscha did not bother reaching for hers.

 

On the edge of laughing again, Kaltain made sound that Sorscha would have described as snorting if it wasn’t to ridiculously elegant.“You seem quiet. As much as I’d like to believe that’s just your personality, I’m inclined to think there’s something else at play. Intimidated by me?”

 

Sorscha kept quiet.

 

“Guilt, then?” Kaltain said.

 

Again, Sorscha didn’t reply. Kaltain seemed to take this as answer enough and continued, “Well, don’t worry.” 

 

It might have been a half-hearted comfort. With her, Sorscha could never really tell. 

 

“You’ll stop losing sleep over it soon enough.”

 

Sorscha wasn’t sure if it was about what she did to Dorian or what she’d asked from Kaltain. Either way it made her uncomfortable. She didn’t want to stop losing sleep over it. She wanted to leave.

 

“So, maybe you’d like to share a little more about yourself.” 

 

Sorscha continued to stare at her drink.

 

“Any other siblings?” Katlain asked and for a second Sorscha could have been convinced that they were just two normal people having a pleasant conversation after agreeing to met at a coffee shop.

 

“I’m an only child myself,” Kaltain continued, “though most people say they can tell that rather easily.”

 

She’d talked over the space someone could have said _it shows_ and beaten them to the punch. Sorscha wondered if that was important at all or if it was just another assessment of how little she spoke and Kaltain’s desire to continue steamrolling over what little pre scene she had in a conversation for fun and a weird sense of superiority or if it was one of those passive-agressive signs of convoluted dominance that featured in all those documentaries picking apart politicians’ micro expressions — the one’s Luca liked to walk when he was into imagining bizarre conspiracies instead of watching fashion shows at his girlfriend’s behest.

 

“Just you and your little brother, then?” Kaltain went on. If Sorscha ignored the preceding context of their relationship, she might actually have felt put at ease by the way Kaltain spoke, interjecting to break icy silences and prompting enough, dragging out her questions long enough, that anyone would have time to think through their words and provide a decent reply they’d feel comfortable with sharing.

 

But, of course, that wasn’t the case at all. Kaltain’s words were polite, and her voice seemed warm enough, but her gaze was cool and dark and she leant back in her chair like it was a throne stacked high into the sky instead of a chair just a small stretch of table, barely an arm’s length, away. 

 

“Why do you care at all?” Sorscha blurted out. 

 

Kaltain smiled. It was pretty, yet unsettling, just managing to reach her eyes, but only on the shallowest surface of them. Somehow it was worse than a smile that didn’t reach the eyes at all. 

 

“A little providence always helps inform your understanding of the source.” Kaltain said. “If they teach us anything in history class, it’s that every author has a bias, wouldn’t you say?” 

 

She bit her tongue and looked down, hands tensed, fingers looping over themselves again and again as though it might make time pass more quickly. Her fidgeting impatience made Kaltain frown.

 

“I have a sister,” she managed to get out. “Sort of. It’s being finalised.”

 

She didn’t offer much more than that. Kaltain stayed silent and the quiet made Sorscha really appreciate how much she could drive a conversation forward on her own. Still, she didn’t budge. Kaltain clicked her tongue.

 

“Fine then. Let’s start somewhere.” Kaltain crossed her arms. Sorscha wondered if she’d finally started grating on _her_ nerves. It tasted like small revenge, petty and satisfying. “I like starting at the end. I read the last page of a book before I buy it. Does that sort of thing bother you?”

 

Even if it did, she doubted that would be enough to make the topic change. “I read the first page a book when I want to buy it.”

 

“I do that too,” Kaltain says. “Everyone does that. But people always try so hard to impress you at the beginning. If you judge by the first page, you’re judging on all that polish. If you really want to see what a person’s really like, you have to see them at their worst. Of course, the ends aren’t really a sign of that. You want to start high and finish high. The middle bit is the real killer, but I like to see where things end up. There’s a nice finality with things like books. It’s very cathartic.”

 

“Are we talking about books or people?”

 

“They’re all the same in the end,” Kaltain said. “Book are written by people, after all.”

 

Answering the unspoken question in the air, Sorscha said. “I disagree.”

 

“That’s too bad, isn’t it?” Kaltain cut off. “Pity we’re not here to discuss the philosophical implication of books. Just boyfriends. So sad. The petty shallowness of youth.” 

 

Sorscha bit her tongue.

 

Kaltain said, “But it’s true. With books, authors get to try hard at the end. TV shows are like too—all the budgets on either end. People just end up in the general direction of what they were running at. Better to judge a book by the middle sections if you really need to know what things are made of. Tragic I don’t care about those parts.”

 

Sorscha bit her tongue harder. It was going numb in her mouth.

 

Kaltain idly stirred her spoon through drink. “You know, I wouldn’t have to babble on like a super villain if you’d just volunteer some information. Then again, I do know you’re the quiet type. A good host has to warm you up.”

 

Warm up or rile up? Sorscha knew she wanted to get some words in, that was for sure…

 

Sorscha said, “Why don’t you care about the middle of a book?”

 

Kaltain blinked. She looked like she might start laughing but, instead, just covered her mouth with her hand and turned to the side.

 

“With books as with life,” Kaltain said, “I don’t really care how people get to the end as long as they get what they want. The goal is more interesting than the means.” She leaned back in her seat, steepled fingers just below her chin. “Which brings us back to business. So, why did you break up?”

 

Sorscha swallowed. “The way I did it wasn’t the greatest. The timing was…”

 

“The timing’s never just so,” Kaltain said. “Things that have to be done have to be done.”

 

It was almost like being reassured. “I still broke up with him.”

 

“Oh,” Kaltain said. She’d managed to grasp something in the words Sorscha never intended to say. _I still hurt him_. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that. “Broke his heart for real, did you?”

 

“I wasn’t trying to.”

 

“He’ll get over it,” Kaltain dismissed, complete with a wave of the hand. “Havilliards always do.”

 

Sorscha squirmed in her seat. “I guess.”

 

“How did you meet?”

 

The abrupt sting of her question made Sorscha flinch. “A public swimming pool.”

 

“Hn.” Kaltain couldn’t contain her laughter. Some of her drink spilled over to the saucer. Considering it wasn’t even that full, Sorscha frowned. Kaltain’s didn’t make much of a move if any to wipe up the mess. None of it had landed on the table so she supposed she wouldn’t have any obligation to do so anyway.

 

Sorscha waited for her to settle down. Kaltain covered her mouth with her hand but Sorscha could still see the edges a smile peeking out behind it. Kaltain’s eyes, gleaming with interest, told her to continue without words. This time, she obliged.

 

“So,” Sorscha started again, trying to ease back in to the water, metaphorical and otherwise. “I went to the public swimming pool and slipped into the water and couldn’t really get out—”

 

Kaltain let out a slow wheeze of laughter, like air leaking out of a balloon after a slip of the hand at its neck.

 

“It’s not funny. I could have died.”

 

“Really?” Kaltain’s fingers curled around her drink again. “How deep was the pool?”

 

“…About four feet.”

 

“You’re pretty short,” Kaltain observed, with a casual flick of her eyes up and down that somehow made Sorscha feel more inadequate and uncomfortable than catcalls. “But I doubt even you’re head would fall under the water at four feet.” 

 

“I know that now but I didn’t know it then. Scared people get panicky.”

 

She snickered. “You can’t swim?”

 

“No. I can’t swim. I was just there to watch Luca.”

 

“And what was your brother doing there?”

 

“He plays water polo.”

 

“Who plays water polo in four feet of water?”

 

“No one. I just fell into the shallow side by accident.”

 

“Hmm.”

 

“You’re not going to ask me why I fell into the water?”

 

“I feel like this is a better story for another day. Besides, I like it more if I can make something up myself. My creative prowess is quite unmatched.”

 

Sorscha regretted ever asking.

 

Kaltain chuckled. “So to recap, you were at the public pool, watching hour brother play water polo, presumably because he is on some sort of team and you were lending him your support, and then you fell into the pool in what seemed a very distressing and life-threatening situation because you could not swim but did not recognise that you were in the shallowed end of that pool.”

 

Sorscha nodded, not daring to find out what dying noise her throat would make if she tried to speak.

 

Kaltain continued, “And how does Dorian relate to this?”

 

“Since I was panicking, he thought I was drowning and dove in to save me…”

 

“In four feet of water?”

 

“My behaviour may have given him the wrong signal.”

 

“I suppose he didn’t may attention to the ‘no diving’ sections in the shallow areas?”

 

“No, he did not.”

 

“What a catch,” Kaltain drawled. “Though if he managed to dive into four feet of water without incurring much injury, I’d be impressed.”

 

“He dove on with his shirt and got nosebleed when his face smacked into the floor.”

 

“Outstanding,” Kaltain pronounced. “I would have thought the Crown Prince would be well trained enough to look before he leaps. Maybe they train those boys for decisiveness too much instead of critical evaluation.”

 

Sorscha’s stomach churned. She continued, “Well, after that I helped stop the bleeding and dress the wound.”

 

“No broken nose, presumably. Anything that could tarnish those good looks would inevitably get reported on in the tabloids.”

 

“His nose was bleeding,” Sorscha said. “But it didn’t seem to be broken. He had a bruise on his forehead but with his hair like that—” Sorscha gestured over her forehead with her hand, mimicking the way Dorian used to style his wavy black hair across his face, brushing over his eyebrows “—I don’t think anyone would have really noticed. He mentioned it. How no one would notice and how that was good. He joked he was afraid of getting me in trouble but I told him he’d gotten injured being heroic.

 

“He laughed. He said girls had gotten him in more trouble for less. He was that popular. I told him he was a little conceited. I think he flinched. I apologised for getting him injured but he asked me to stay a little longer. He was Dorian Havilliard, so of course I did.”

 

Kaltain exhaled, sharp, through the nose, turning her head away to the side. “Quaint.”

 

“Sorry,” Sorscha said, more habitual than anything. She didn’t bite her tongue in time. “But _you’re_ the one who asked.”

 

Kaltain blinked. She was still. She tilted her head to the side and rested in on the flat of her palm, elbow digging into the table. “That’s true.” She licked her lips. “You have to be careful with words. I get warned, but I suppose I never really pay enough attention to it.”

 

A shrug.

 

“I just find it intriguing.” Kaltain gestured to her, up and down. “You and him. You letting _go_ of him.”

 

“I don’t think it’s that interesting.”

 

“You don’t think _it’s_ that interesting, or you don’t think _you’re_ very interesting? Because the latter is most definitely what the case seems to be.”

 

 _Then why are you still here_ , Sorscha restrained herself from asking.

 

Kaltain went on, clearly delighted to be given the opportunity to monologue. Sorscha wondered if she just got lonely. “If you’re as uninteresting as you think you are, maybe that’s what makes you being with him so interesting. The narrative is really all there already without you doing anything. Handsome prince, poor nobody girl. Chance meeting.A fairy tale made real. You don’t even need a personality. The idea is enough to carry things through.”

 

“I think that’s a very boring story.”

 

“It’s a cliche story,” Kaltain clarified. “Just because something’s predictable, doesn’t mean it’s boring.”

 

“It’s that the definition of boring?”

 

“Some people like their entertainment a little more tame. There’s a plenty in a good story even if you can predict it. Sometimes that makes it better.” Kaltain gave a small laugh. “Why does everyone hate traditional craftsmanship these days? Plenty of ways to tell the same story well. Wouldn’t you think? Even a little twist is enough to freshen something up.”

 

“I’m confused. Am I the twist or am I the standard?”

 

“Why don’t you look in a mirror and guess?” Kaltain said. “Fennharrow by way of Eyllwe. It’s something, I suppose.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“It’s a little more interesting than a Terrasen-born queen consort. Just a little. Plenty of those in history already.”

 

Sorscha’s blood ran cold. She ran her fingers over her arm, nails digging into skin. She glances over at Kaltain who, almost smirking, pulled up the sleeves of her shirt to show her pale, pale, wrists, almost as white and fair as the crisp bleached fabric of her clothes. Sorscha hid her hands under the table. Kaltain refrained from rolling her eyes but did give a glance over her shoulder, trembling a little like she was holding back another laugh. She pulled her sleeves back down to her wrists.

 

“He’s rich. In another class, so to speak.” Kaltain cupped her chin in her hands. The fabric of her shirt creased into heavy lines around her elbows and her sleeves rode in a little. Sorscha couldn’t stop looking at her wrists and the blue veins that ran through them like the angry after trails of lightning or the rivers that carved through Fenharrow’s flat plains and glinted cloudy, grey skies back up, crawling through like shiny snakes. Skin that was too pale for the South but too ghostly sheet white for here in Adarlan. “Literally in another class, really.”

 

“Just because he’s rich, doesn’t mean I’d have to put up with him,” Sorscha said. “Just because anyone’s rich, doesn’t mean anyone else has to put up with them.”

 

Kaltain smiled. Whether or not she recognised the barb didn’t seem to matter. “Trouble in paradise?”

 

Sorscha didn’t reply.

 

Kaltain said, “There must be, otherwise we wouldn’t be her at all.”

 

“Is it so hard to believe that—” _someone like me “—_ I could want to break up with him and be happy about my choice?” 

 

“However mediocre he might be in practice, I find it hard to believe that anyone would let go of him,” Kaltain said. “If it was a match that advantageous, my father would have sooner shot me than let me dump the boy. Your parents didn’t raise any eyebrows at you and _Dorian Havilliard_?” 

 

She said his name like he was a phenomenon or a pay check, a winning lottery number or an acceptance to a school, instead of a over earnest boy with nice hair and a tendency to overdo it with his flowery words and big romantic gestures. Sorscha hated it.

 

“They didn’t know I was dating anyone.”

 

Kaltain cracked a smile at that. Not surprise, but just a vague, detached interest.

 

“I take it back,” she said levelly. “You’re not a total goody-goody. Well, you did ask me to bribe a police officer to get your brother out of trouble, but still.”

 

“I didn’t ask you to bribe anyone!” Sorscha protested. “I just wanted money for my brother’s _totally legal_ bail.”

 

“Oh, yes, yes.” Kaltain waved her hand through the air, dismissing the issue as though it were just something unfortunately caught on the wind. “That’s right. Everything else was just a free service on my part, pardon that inexcusable transgression.”

 

“Why do you talk like that?”

 

“Talk like what? Like you’re a dirt on a shoe?” She dabbed at her face with a napkin. “That’s accidental. Apparently I seem like I talk down to everyone I meet.”

 

 _You don’t say? I wonder where they got that impression from,_ she wanted to ask, even though another part of her brain wanted to know where the shoe comparison came from. “No. I mean, half the time you talk like a normal person and the other half it’s like… Old-fashioned words, lots of syllables, phrasing things unnecessarily formally.”

 

“Oh _that_.” Kaltain sipped on her drink. “Yeah, no, I’m just really pretentious.”

 

Sorscha almost laughed but faltered, choking it down to a weird snort in the back of her throat. Kaltain looked up in what might have been constructed as a glare, nose hidden behind her inclined cup. Sorscha froze. Was she supposed to laugh? Was she not suppose to laugh.

 

“It’s a joke,” Kaltain said. “It’s funny because it’s true. Appreciate my humour. Laugh.”

 

Sorscha could not thaw herself out of her frozen paralysis.

 

Kaltain rolled her eyes. “Never mind. Moment’s gone. Let’s move along.”

 

It was then Sorscha’s brain finally processed ideas fast enough to realise saying _You’re not that pretentious. Are you sure you’re not doing it on purpose? You just said ‘yeah’_ but the moment had indeed passed and, as it often did, the witticism her brain could think up would never have the opportunity to be used. Then again, a few seconds after the event was still better than realising what she could have said on the bus ride home or lying awake at night months later, damning herself for not thinking of that one phrase earlier.

 

“He may be Crown Prince of all of Adarlan and its empire, but I doubt that’s all you were interested in. Not to cause offence, but I doubt you’re the type.” _Unlike me_ was the unspoken implication of Kaltain’s words. Aloud, she added, eschewing any need for subtlety, “Why then?”

 

Sorscha’s cheeks felt hot. “That’s personal.”

 

Kaltain rolled her eyes. Still, she conceded. “Another time, then. Why did you want to break up with him if not for any failings you might have seen in him?”

 

Sorscha swallowed. “It would have been selfish of me to make him stay. He’s meant for greater things.”

 

“‘Greater things’? He’s not going to be ruling a country any time soon. The constitution took care of that a while ago.”

 

Sorscha bristled. “Just because won’t be head of a government doesn’t mean he can do whatever he likes. He’s got responsibilities.”

 

“Considering how often he goes clubbing, you’d never be able to guess.”

 

“I was already selfish,” Sorscha told her. “I knew he—” _needed_ “—deserved someone else. Someone better. But I wanted him. So I stayed. It was only later I figured it out.”

 

“That you were enough?”

 

Sorscha squirmed in her seat.

 

Kaltain said, “That you _weren’t_ enough?”

 

Sorscha shuffled back as far as she could in the chair without scratching the floor, skidding it away. The chair legs stuttered a bit but didn’t manage to jump much of anywhere.

 

Kaltain gave a ghost of a smile, flickering in somewhere around the corner of her lips. “That you didn’t _want_ to be enough?” She neatly laced her fingers together, right thumb over left, and set her hands down neatly on the table, pressed in a tight line so clean there wasn’t even space for shadows to flicker through. “That you didn’t want to be there?”

 

Sorscha tried speaking. Her throat felt dry. She reached for her drink, now just tepidly above room temperature. Kaltain’s glass was almost empty. Sorscha wondered if she’d go and order another one. She hoped they’d get kicked out now their drinks were finished. Considering how slow business was, it seemed improbable.

 

“Well, as far as royal family’s go, Adarlan’s isn’t as glamorous as they used to be,” Kaltain said in what Sorscha guessed was something resembling consolation. “Even one generation ago they were, well how should I put this, ‘on trend’? Dorian’s handsome, but you know if that he wasn’t then there wouldn’t be hardly as much interest. Just look at what’s his face.”

 

“Hollin?”

 

“Exactly.”

 

Kaltain tapped her spoon against the edge of the saucer her cup was on. It wasn’t in any particular rhythm, or anything bearing a semblance of musical merit. Just…tapping, idle and not quite impatient. Kind of thoughtless.

 

“It could be worse,” Kaltain said. “They could all end up like Wendlyn’s. Royalty riding bicycles around. Who wants to see that? Honestly. If you’re going to go through all the embarrassment just cede power to the republic like Terrasen.”

 

Kaltain gestured. She didn’t even bother looking around for a waiter. The coffee machine behind the counter screeched softly, steam billowing out from it. Another drink made it onto the table and her old, empty cup and saucer were replaced. Kaltain reached her hand forward to flick through the sugar packets.

 

She was a regular here then, maybe. If Sorscha dared, she might come back here one day and ask the staff a bit about Kaltain. But that would also mean risking running into Kaltain, which seemed unpleasant enough to bury any idle curiosity she had. Whatever the case, it didn’t seem like they were going to be leaving here just yet.

 

Kaltain’s drink was strong enough that Sorscha could smell the whiff of dark coffee in the air around her. No milk. Sorscha wondered how much caffeine ended up flowing through those veins and if she’d developed a chemical insensitivity already. 

 

“So you weren’t ready?”

 

Sorscha nodded. “I wasn’t— Who is?”

 

“Well, we are just teenagers, after all.”

 

“We are.”

 

“Would you have been ready eventually? At all, really. Ever.”

 

“I don’t think…” Words seemed to have a habit of dying in Sorscha’s throat and leaving it dry and ashy. 

 

“You could have been selfish,” Kaltain proposed. “I would have been. You could have made him wait for you and you for him. You could have him do whatever you wanted. He loved you, after all, didn’t he?”

 

Did he?

 

“I didn’t want that kind of life. That kind of pressure.” She gripped her arm. “He told me about it, you know. His life. The spotlight. The attention. The constant demands to be held up to some invisible standard. And one day, he’ll be king. I don’t want to be part of that. He deserves…”

  
Kaltain scoffed, laughing. “What? Better? Making yourself a little martyr because you couldn’t handle the heat? You just said you dumped him because he wasn’t going to give you the kind of life you wanted. That _is_ being selfish.”

 

“What was I supposed to do, then? When you say it that way, you make it seem like the only option is being selfish.”

 

“That’s all human being really are anyway.”

 

“So you think I was being selfish after all.”

 

“I never said it was a bad thing,” Kaltain drawled, stirring her drink. “You’ve got to look out for yourself. I just think it’s amusing you keep painting it as such a tragedy.”

 

“Sorry.”

 

“That apology doesn’t feel particularly heartfelt. Was it worth giving at all then?”

 

“Sorry?” Sorscha blurted out as a request for the words to be repeated, but she only realised too late what she’d actually said

 

Kaltain gave a snort of laughter to dignified to be an actual snort. “Was it rhetorical or not? You’ll never know.”

 

Sorscha put her hands back on the table where Kaltain could see them. She gripped her wrist. If she rubbed her thumb on the inside of it, she could imagine someone else was trying to make her feel better. She’d done it long enough that she could convince herself it was true.

 

“Don’t look so put out,” Kaltain said. “People in this country will apologise for bumping into a door. Even _to_ the door. It’s a little…” She waved her hand through the air. “Well whatever.”

 

“Is that what you think about Adarlan?” Sorscha wondered aloud, quiet.

 

Kaltain didn’t ask her to speak up and repeat herself. Maybe the room was quiet enough for that to be unnecessary.

 

“You shouldn’t really care about what I think,” Kaltain said. “You’re the one who has to live with your decisions, not me. Of course, one of those decisions led to my involvement and if I’m dissatisfied, it could prove very inconvenient to you so, maybe you should care after all.”

 

Sorscha stiffened in her seat.

 

“It was a joke,” Kaltain said. She leant back and crossed her arms. It took Sorscha a moment to realise she might actually be sulking. “Fine then. Maybe you _should_ care. Was it a joke? You’ll never know now.”

 

It was a joke and Kaltain was sulking because Sorscha hadn’t thought it was funny. Childish pettiness. The more Sorscha thought about it, the less surprising it seemed. Sorscha looked at the creases and wrinkles that had embedded themselves into Kaltain’s sleeves around the elbows.

 

“Well are you?”

 

“Sorry?”

 

Kaltain just smiled. “Are you happy with your choices?”

 

Sorscha wasn’t sure how big the group that question was meant to cover really was. Happy about not being with Dorian? Happy with who she was? Happy with how she spent her time?

 

“It just… Everything feels like a bad decision.” Up to and including being here right now. Kaltain could probably guess the subtext of that. Even if she didn’t, her self-assured expression gave enough of the impression that she did and that was more that sufficient to put Sorscha and edge.

 

“Well, we’re teenagers,” Kaltain said again as though Sorscha wasn’t painfully aware of her age. “We’re known for doing very foolish things in the name of very foolish ends. Just look at your brother.”

 

Was that really how teenage love worked? It seemed hard to believe that Kaltain, business cool and cold-blooded ambition, could ever be so besotted with _any_ boy she’d go through this much trouble just to hear what he might like in a girl.

 

“Do you really like him that much?”

 

“Do _you_ think I like him that much?” 

 

Everyone expressed themselves in different ways. Her sister (to be or otherwise) took great pains cutting out magazine articles and photos of Leighfer Bardingale, collaging them into a scrapbook replete with trivia and little hearts doodled into the side. Maybe this was just the scary, grown-up version of that.Sorscha made a mental note to never allow her sister to turn out remotely like Kaltain. She didn’t know how she’d manage it, but she’d make a plan. She always did. She always managed something.

 

“At least tell me he had some sort of secret flame he was depriving himself from because of you,” Kaltain said. “Who’s his most likely rebound candidate?”

 

“He’s doing his military service now…”

 

“There’s nothing wrong rebounding that way either. Though one might assume he’d be discrete.” Kaltain paused. “Ah, I’ll be discrete too if that’s necessary. A deal’s a deal.”

 

“He’s not—” Sorscha sucked in a sharp breathe. “I’m sure Chaol stops him from doing anything.” 

 

“Chaol Westfall? Seems an unlikely candidate for a rebound but who am I to judge?”

 

“That’s not what I—”

 

Kaltain was snickering. Sorscha stopped talking.

 

“So, really no one else then? No one he was interested in. Not even a type? No wandering eyes when you went out.”

 

She shook her head.

 

“What a waste of a pretty face, wouldn’t you say?” Kaltain inspected her nails. “Boy like that deserves something to put his arm around when he walks. Or at the very least, someone to warm up his bed. Forgive my crassness.”

 

“If you’re so interested in him, then why haven’t you already gone and gotten him?” Sorscha grit out.

 

Kaltain looked taken a back for half a second, the way people looked when small, harmless looking dogs on leads startled you when they barked. The smug surprise on her face made Sorscha want to add something else, but she couldn’t think of anything and her hands clenched into fists by her sides. “I don’t pursue other people. I get pursued. It’s a status thing.”

 

Sorscha resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

 

“I don’t pursue other people. It’s a waste of my time. I get pursued.”

 

“If you liked someone—”

 

“If I liked someone then, yes, by all means, I could, but I would rather not.”

 

“Girls can ask boys out now these days.”

 

“ _They_ can, sure,” Kaltain said. “ _I_ don’t care for it. I don’t have time for that.”

 

“But you’re interested in Dorian.”

 

“Everyone in the country is interested in Dorian.”

 

“Are you?”

 

“I’m in the country, aren’t I?”

 

“I don’t know,” Sorscha sighed, exasperated. “Since you were willing to pay off someone just to get some information about him, I just assumed you were also the kind of person who’d formulate some sort of crazy scheme to make him yours or whatever.”

 

“Just because I’m interested in him, doesn’t mean I want him,” Kaltain said. Then she frowned. “Well, maybe a little. No one can deny he has a face that could stop traffic.”

 

“So what’s _this_ all for, then?” Sorscha’s voice cracked higher and louder. Her hands thumped down on the table. 

 

She didn’t realise how much force she was putting into them until she realise she’s accidentally knocked down a spoon and sent the small plastic bowl holding packets of creamer and sugar tumbling down to the floor. Flustered and with her show of disproval rendered totally anticlimactic, she scrambled to pick it up and clean the table up. Kaltain waited and watched as she did so and, although she was quiet, Sorscha could still hear the silent snickering curling through the air all in the sight of Kaltain’s sickly, vinegar-sharp smile.

 

“Window shopping at a Crown Prince,” Kaltian started once she was sure Sorscha was looking at her. “Isn’t that just an impressive sort of thing to do? One might as well by smart watches for their dog—one for each paw.”

 

“Is it all just a status thing then?” Sorscha forced the words out through grit teeth, her tongue pressed tight and hard against the roof of her mouth.

 

Kaltain shrugged. “Who’s to say?”

 

“I’m not really into pondering the philosophical implications of all this.” All this _bullshit_ that was.

 

“And here I thought Dorian liked all your bookish charms,” Kaltain drawled. “I’m sure you’ve heard the expression ‘knowledge is power’.”

 

“It’s _gossip about a teenage boy_.”

 

“Yes,” Kaltain said, “and he’s also the Crown Prince of Adarlan.” She frowned, just a tad, but not enough to take the smugness away from her eyes or the self-satisfaction from buzzing around her. “It had better not just be gossip. I paid good money for genuine, authentic tattle-telling. Am I being scammed?”

 

Sorscha swallowed. “No! No, you’re not! I—”

 

“Pfft.” There is was again. Laugher like air leaking out of a balloon for just a second, a tire just after being slashed, a cold draught intruding into a warm room. 

 

“I don’t think you’re that good at lying,” Kaltain said. “Although, you never know with the ones that look like you.” She tilted her head. “There’s not much to lose even if you are so I don’t care that much.”

 

Sorscha spoke before thinking. “Are you so bored that you’ll do this to entertain yourself?”

 

“I routinely set fire to dried leaves rolled up between paper and inhale toxic, often tar-tinged smoke to entertain myself,” Kaltain said. “Nothing’s impossible.”

 

“Smoking’s bad for you.”

 

Kaltain rested her head on her hand, elbow back on the table, manners be damned. “No kidding. Haven’t we been down this route before?”

 

They had. How was Sorscha supposed to get out of this? What were they discussing before the digression again?

 

“What _do_ you want with Dorian anyway? You want to date him? Marriage?”

 

“We’re a little young for the second part. I think I’d like to finish university first, at least.”

 

“Then that’s your end plan?”

 

Kaltain bristled. “Back when the Royal Family of Ardalan was known its tyrant kings domineering over the land with harsh taxes and bloody obliteration of its opponents instead of pretty boy princes who frequented nightclubs, Dorian Havilliard might have interested me. Now he’s just a pretty boy strutting around like an embarrassing peacock. Not even a cute one.”

 

“The only reason we even started talking to each other is because you wanted to know about him.”

 

“Yes, and you’re painting a very lacklustre portrait of him. It really kills the magic. What a waste of a good face. Not that the company he keeps doesn’t do well to dispel the mystique too.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

Kaltain looked up. She pursed her lips. “Ah, not you.” Her voice was flat and Sorscha wondered if this was as close to apologetic as she was programmed to go. “If I was insulting you, you’d definitely know it.”

 

So her default tone of voice was just that irritating goading? That was almost unfortunate. Or maybe Sorscha just had poor social senses. Another person might be better suited to tell when Kaltain was mocking them. 

 

There was only one way to get out of here anyway.

 

Sorscha swallowed the dry lump in her throat. She licked her lips. Her hands grabbed the edges of the table to anchor herself still and solid.

 

“Everyone’s always looking at him,” she said. “And he’s tired. He’s really tired. I wanted to but I couldn’t— I couldn’t do that every day. I wouldn’t know the first place to start. I don’t even think—” She swallowed. “I’m not even sure I’d want to.”

 

Want to stay by him? Want to try? God, she didn’t even know what was happening anymore. These things were supposed to be done and buried, set aflame and scattered to the wind atop that skyscraper restaurant. 

 

She stayed quiet. Kaltain set her drink down. The porcelain clashed against each other, a sound too sharp, but Sorscha couldn’t find it in herself to wince.

 

Kaltain leaned back against her seat, but not as far back as before. It was only as far as necessary to take some weight off of her spine, straight and solid, shoulders squared instead of slouched over disdainfully. Sorscha looked down at her lap, fingers wringing against each other. She picked at her cuticles. Kaltain’s hands were folded, visible, on the table. They did not move. There was a sigh. The sound of blood pounding to Sorscha’s ears made it hard to tell where it was coming from. Vaguely, she assumed it wasn’t her own self.

 

“It does destroy people,” Kaltain finally said in a delivery halfway between a comforting word and an exchange in misery, the ghost of a smile on her face. “Being watched like that.”

 

There was something in that. Sorscha saw because that was all she did and all she was good at—the long tried effects of an enforced practiced. Kaltain rested her forearms on the table, fingers steepled together over the coffee, wrists over the last slowly wafting bits of steam form the drink. The sleeves of her shirt had rolled down far enough, wrinkles over wrinkles all creasing at the elbows, some sort of reminder that this was still a human being Sorscha was sitting next to — that her clothes folded and needed to be pressed, that sweat leeched onto the collar and pressed fabric taught to skin, that things were things that obeyed the same rules they always did, no matter who owned them. 

 

Sorscha looked at the veins that just peaked through on her own wrists. She looked at Kaltain’s. There was no more lightning or rivers or snakes. Just blood trickling through.

 

“I’m sorry,” she said.

 

Kaltain scoff-laughed. “What are you apologising for this time?”

 

Sorscha looked down at the table. She laced her fingers around her drink. The porcelain was smooth and hot and she wondered how long she’d have to leave her skin there for the tingling to turn to a burn. “I don’t know.”

 

“No,” Kaltain sighed. She drew her hands back and tucked them under the table, on her lap. Not Adarlan manners, where everyone did their best to keep their hands where they could be seen. Sorscha read things because that was what you did to fill the time and, in a faint and dusty corner of her mind, she recalled that that was meant to be common courtesy in Fenharrow and across the sea, way down South. 

 

There was a difference, though, in a sentence tossed around through all the unreliable corridors of cyberspace, and confirming something with your own eyes: habits that were incongruous as they were innocuous, not something you’d ever notice unless you were told to look out for it in advance.

 

Sorscha blinked. She realised Kaltain was staring at her, prompting. She’d been the last person to speak. It was Sorscha’s turn now, those eyes were telling her. She would not be moved to push the conversation forward anymore than she already had. _I don’t pursue other people. I get pursued._

 

Well, it’d be nice if she was a little more direct.

 

A shadow cast itself over their table. 

 

The figure who cast it was a woman, but Sorscha couldn’t make much else out because the way the ceiling lights glared out behind her. Kaltain ignored it the way she ignored everything else not directly relevant to her.

 

The figure’s voice rose up.

 

“Sorscha.” She cleared her throat. 

 

They both turned.

 

“If it isn’t Nehemia Ytger,” Kaltain cooed without any affection. Empty pleasantries for no particular audience. “Imagine seeing you here.”

 

“Kaltain,” Nehemia said, curt and cold.

 

Kaltain smiled back in greeting, eyes half-lidded, fingers laced neatly around her coffee. She looked out the window as though she caught sight of something vaguely amusing and then turned back. “How’s university treating you?”

 

“Fine, though it certainly isn’t any of your concern.”

 

“No, I suppose not.” Kaltain sipped her coffee. She put her elbow on the table and rested her cheek on her hand as her other arm crept out to sprawl itself of the surface and take up as much space as possible. “Don’t let me stop your conversation. I’d hate to break up such a dear reunion.”

 

Kaltain said it like Sorscha had spent the afternoon regaling her with stories about her dear friendship with Nehemia and like Kaltain was Sorscha’s steadfast confidante. It was bullshitting at it’s finest and Sorscha was both impressed and mildly disgusted by the way her features had lit up with such a fresh and light politeness by way of friendly courtesy. 

 

In truth, Sorscha had met Nehemia only on a handful of occasions, Dorian or one of his other friends always present to mediate the awkward silence, but the older girl was always gracious and welcoming. It seemed impossible for her to give a bad impression. The air around her seemed to calm to a supernatural stillness, just as at ease as the rest of her bearing.

 

Nehemia glanced at her from the side and then turned to Sorscha, looking her in the eve with a gravity that didn’t seem to fi t the situation. “Can I talk to you outside for a bit?”

 

“Oh. Um.” Sorscha turned to Kaltain. Kaltain just shrugged, taking another lackadaisical sip of her coffee, ever smiling. “Sure.”

 

“Great.” Nehemia took her by the arm and guided her out the door.

 

* * *

 

Nehemia looked stunning as always, even with that air of vague fatigue that perpetually ringed law students the world over. Her bad looked heavy, uncomfortably cutting into her shoulder and creasing the nice, soft-looking cardigan she wore over her silk blouse. Law books, probably. A lot of reading and a lot of pain.

 

The gold tipped braids in her hair chimed softly against each other as she moved. “What are you doing?”

 

Sorscha didn’t quite get it. “What am I doing?”

 

“Here,” Nehemia amended. “What are you doing here?”

 

“I’m just there,” Sorscha said and pointed back to the coffee shop. “Talking.”

 

Nehemia’s expression softened and she leaned in closer, glancing over Sorscha’s shoulder and into the coffee shop, no doubt at the seat where Kaltain was. Sorscha turned and followed her gaze. Yes, she was looking straight at Kaltain.

 

Kaltain must have noticed the movement out of the corner of her eye, because she looked up from her phone and waved, lazy smirk on her face. Nehemia frowned and pulled them to the side, away from the window’s line of sight.

 

“Do you know who that is?” she said like she was on a mountain, balancing being heard over the wind against the possibility of sparking an avalanche. 

 

“Kaltain Rompier,” Sorscha said.

 

“And do you know who Kaltain Rompier _is_?”

 

“Yes?” Sorscha said, regretting the way her voice cracked. “Maybe? Kind of? We just met.”

 

Nehemia looked her straight in the eye. “She’s—” A family with two children walked past, stroller chugging along against the uneven road, daughter dragging a grotty teddy bear behind her by the hand “—not a good person.”

 

“She’s just helping me out with something,” Sorscha said, eyes tracing the family, hands holding hands and warm smiles, as they walked down the street.

 

Nehemia’s eyes radiated concern. Her voice was not filled with confidence. “Helping you out. Really? _Helping_?”

 

“Honestly, she is,” Sorscha said.

 

“There are other people in the world you can help you with things.” Nehemia leant in and put a reassuring hand on her arm. “Don’t trust a word she says. Kaltain Rompier is bad news. You do what you have to do, Sorscha. But be careful.”

 

“What’s so bad about her?”

 

Nehemia frowned and bit the inside of her chin. Sorscha could only tell by the tiny, subtle way the her left cheek seemed to sink down and inwards and she sucked in a tired breath. “She has a reputation.” 

 

“But people change, don’t they?”

 

“I think people become more themselves, whoever they may be.” Nehemia sighed. “That girl is something else. Just be careful, alright?” 

 

“Why?”

 

“She’s something of a bully,” Nehemia said. “I hope she’s not taking advantage of you.”

 

“There are worse things in the world to be,” Sorscha said. “And she’s not.” Not really. It seemed like a fair enough deal they had, on paper if anything.

 

“It’s not right to judge a person based off rumours, but the things they say about Kaltain Rompier are hardly the most pleasant. Even without those, I’d have to say, in my experience, she’s not the most… _agreeable_ person to be around.”

 

“I can understand why you’d say that.” Sorscha wasn’t exactly finding her company a delight either, but obligations were obligations and needed to be fulfilled.

 

Nehemia looked down. The her gaze flickered up a little to meet Sorscha in the eye. She still ended up having to crane her neck down anyway. Nehemia was just tall like that, elegant and impressive.

 

“Children can do some terrible things. It makes you wonder how much of that can be blamed on them being children.”

 

“Is everything alright?”

 

“I’m just wondering,” Nehemia said. She rubbed her eyes. “Something I’ve read.”

 

“It must be tough,” Sorscha said. “University.”

 

“It’s rewarding in it’s own right,” Nehemia replied. She smiled. “We should catch up.”

 

“Oh,” Sorscha said. “Did Dorian, um, tell you…?”

 

Nehemia smile widened, just a tad. “You did wonders for him, don’t worry. He can get over it. Besides, Celaena likes talking to you. She complains the rest of us try and make things too old. Really, her tastes are the ones that are too old. Why else would we all end up her friends?”

 

“Oh.”

 

“Really,” Nehemia said. “Your phone number is still the same, isn’t it?”

 

“It is.” Sorscha wondered if she meant it, or it was just polite courtesy that would never get followed up on. She wondered if, in other circumstances, she might have bumped into Kaltain on the street and found her perfectly charming and agreeable. There must have been people who did.

 

Nehemia put her hand on Sorscha’s shoulder. “Take care of yourself.”

 

Sorscha knew she meant it.

 

* * *

 

Nehemia did not accompany her back into the coffee shop. If anything, she wanted to get as far away from Kaltain as possible. ‘For the sake of my own patience,’ Nehemia had said. Sorscha wasn’t sure if it was because Kaltain was that grating or because law school had worn her nerve too thin to endure said grating.

 

She sat down. She hung her jacket on the back of her chair. Kaltain had finished her drink and started on another one. The waiters had either neglected to take away her old cup, or she’d ask them to leave it so she could make a point. Sorscha got it.

 

“Did that conversation go well for you?” Kaltain said. She set her phone on the table, screen side down, and reached for her coffee.

 

“Nothing you need to be concerned with,” Sorscha said, trying to remember the bite in Nehemia’s voice when she’s said the same thing.

 

“Oh?” Kaltain raised an eyebrow. “Well, I suppose not. I never found her that interesting anyway.”

 

Sorscha tried to reconcile the cool derision in her face with the blank, nonplussed, almost pout of the time she made a failed joke. She tried to reconcile a fondness for awful puns with a ruthless utilitarianism to exploit your fellow man. She tried to reconcile the image of someone who nonchalantly bribed police officers into releasing a thief and dropping charges with the image of someone who wrinkled their nose when they frowned like a kid who’d just been denied desert after finishing all their vegetables.

 

“You’re weird,” Sorscha blurted out. 

 

Kaltain tilted her head, just smirking, no sign of offence marring her face. Just an amused raise of one eyebrow that quickly sunk back down to neutral observance. “You’re interesting.”

 

She dabbed at her face with a napkin an tossed it across the table, not near Sorscha but certainly in her half of the table.

 

“I’ll see you next week.” 

 

“Already?” she said.

 

“Disappointed I’m leaving?”

 

“No! I just thought— It seemed like we were still in the middle of a conversation when Nehemia got here and I just thought—”

 

“I think I’m good for today,” Kaltain said. “Nehemia Ytger was just a little wave that ruined an otherwise nice rhythm. Got to quit while you’re ahead and all.”

 

“We’re done?” Sorscha repeated.

 

“We are indeed. Remember to pay attention to your phone. I don’t like waiting on replies to texts.” Kaltain said, and disappeared out the door.

 

Sorscha stared dumbly at her cup, still half-filled with coffee and the pastry only nibbled at. She looked at Kaltain’s seat, dent in the cheap leather slowly rising back up again. She looked at the wall clock, an abstract collection of scrap metal welded together at odd angles and when she couldn’t tell the time on that she looked at her phone. No messages.

 

She breathed in. Breathed out. Two more to go. The weight crushing down on her shoulders shifted, settling into a more comfortable position.

 

The strangest feeling of all, though, was that it wasn’t as awful as it could have been.

 


	3. the great source

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaltain acts weird, then monologues. Sorscha listens uncomfortably and tries not to develop empathy. Also, there's some art.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The majority of this chapter, and indeed, large chunks of this story, was drafting in the time between Heir of Fire and Queen of Shadows. Now, having read Tower of Dawn, I have been called to action to attempt to do something with the sprawling mess of chapters on my hard drive. 
> 
> To all two of my attentive readers, thank you. I do hope you still have some interest. To all new readers joining us, you may begin to know me as that one person in the fandom who is far too attached to a crackship.
> 
> This chapter was originally part of one giant mega-chapter, but it was just getting too long... At least now you know the next one is conceivably in sight.

* * *

 

 

Kaltain’s notice had been given enough in advance that, she looked forward to the extra hour or two of sleeping in that could be squeezed into the remainder of her holiday before their meeting.

 

It was an unfortunate oversight that she had forgotten to change her alarm to accommodate this later meeting time.

 

Sorscha was good at responding. Responding to what other people thought, responding to expectations, responding even to loud noises. It was a good thing she was like that, at any rate, because Luca could get up by the third time someone knocked on his door and reminded him to hurry it up, but not by the second. (She, Emrys and Malakai took it in turns making sure he didn’t wreck his sleeping schedule past any recognisable diurnal pattern. It was a good system and Sorscha liked it because it made her feel a part of something—necessary and useful and appreciated.)

 

She had always liked the fact she got up easily at the sound of alarms, the sound of anything to be honest: Emrys humming along to old songs on the restored gramophone he and his husband had spend many lazy afternoons fixing up, or Malakai whistling as he flipped pancakes and grilled bacon for impromptu breakfast feasts. Waking up, however groggy she felt, had always led to the best case scenario of not missing a thing.

 

So today, just as was her habit, she continued to respond.

 

To her alarm.

 

Her accursed alarm that she’d forgotten to change.

 

She couldn’t even blame Kaltain for this. The ample notice she’d given covered more than a considerate grace period. It was unfair. Well, not unfair, but it left her bitter and dissatisfied when the only thing that was around to blame was her own carelessness. Life was just like that, wasn’t it?

 

Sorscha groggily slammed snooze on the alarm. There was no sense in getting up so early now. What was even the point? She wouldn’t take that long to get ready. (She couldn’t imagine how long it took Kaltain to look ready no matter how effortless she attempted to make her appearance look and she really didn’t want to believe it _was_ effortless however petty that made her seem.)

 

So she tried to go back to sleep.

 

* * *

 

After she closed her eyes, her body drifting somewhere inside itself, she found herself sitting at table on a rooftop under a sea of stars.

 

Nothing about it struck her as strange: not the perfectly black sky dotted with stars against the perfectly bright green of the tree leaves; nor the way everything else around her was perfectly lit like it was daytime on a movie set despite the dark overhead and the lack of a sun or moon anywhere in sight.

 

She blinked.

 

Dorian appeared in front of her, in the seat opposite (they had somehow materialised in this perfectly notice of a void at a dining table), wearing a collared shirt but no jacket, the sleeves pushed up to reveal his forearms. She could see the veins bulging out a shallowly as he tensed his arms, crossing them, and fiddled with the folded over cuff of his shirt between his fingers. It was just the shape of those veins through the skin. (Veins or other blood vessels? Sorscha didn’t know the names. She’d never studied hard enough.) The shape of them still poked through the skin a little on what must have a been a bed of lean muscle. The colour was all even, that same slight tan as across the rest of him. The tan was dark enough that the flush of colour made it hard to see the colour of the thin branches of veins at his wrists.

 

He was speaking, saying something, but she couldn’t hear the words. Just moving his lips with no noises, not even a muffled, muted drone. She kept looking at his hands. Maybe it was because he kept moving them, fiddling with that shirt, a nervous tic. The veins at his wrists were barely visible, barely a collection of vague grey smudges and she could only make out a line or two at that, clearly at least. Why was she thinking about pale blue cleaving its way through paler white? It was normal for veins to only be so visible after all. What was with her fixation on them?

 

Dorian’s hands were as beautiful as the rest of him, of course, but she couldn’t help note at this juncture regarding just how thick his fingers were, especially around each joint, how short the nails were no matter how shiny and well groomed they were, the traces of hair across half of the back of them, thick individual strands just thinly spread across the skin. Quite masculine, she realised, and not even just because of their size. But they were still long and slim and beautiful and she wondered, just a little, why those aspects of them seemed so much more pertinent to notice than the underlying strength in them or the presumed warmth of his palms, sweat dewing up in them.

 

His hands dropped then, laying flat across the table.

 

A noise. She looked up.

 

Dorian’s raven hair caught the moonless moonlight (light from somewhere in this surrealist set up) in silver flecks that made him look suddenly weary, aged before his time. Around the edges of his stray curls, the light reflected off the edges of each hair, like a holy emblem glowing jagged against his forehead, inexplicably orange-gold where it met his skin.

 

He was going to say something. His mouth opened. Sorscha stared at his lips. Instead of a voice, all she heard was a blaring wall of sound, fingernails screeching across her brain and—

 

* * *

 

Oof.

 

She threw herself up and out of bed. Her pillow, somehow knocked about in the clamour, flopped down on the floor. She looked around. Just her room, sunlight filtering in through the not quite broken blinds. Her phone alarm sounded a second after that in a dulcet, eight bit inspired chime. She rubbed her eyes and threw off the rest of the blankets from the tangle they formed over her legs.

 

She should have known better than to try to get to sleep again after she’d already woken up. It never ended well. Nightmares and weird dreams, every time.

 

* * *

 

 

 

Kaltain met her in her school uniform.

 

Sorscha assumed as much anyway from the stiff, gold-trimmed collar of her shirt with the crest embroidered onto its breast, the neat tie hanging from a neater knot, the pleated skirt that seemed to be made of fabric too heavy to be comfortable in the dank heat, the pristinely white socks, and shiny leather shoes. She had a blazer slung over her shoulder and what little bits of the lining Sorscha could see poking through looked soft and fine, silky finishing shining like it was glowing in the downpour of sunlight. It matched the colours of the tie.

 

Dorian must have worn a similar uniform once.

 

She’d never seen him in it, not in real life — why would she have? He’d graduated by the time they met. If she wanted she could look it up and see if there were any pictures online but somehow her curiosity didn’t edge her on that much. She’d seen Dorian in suits and that was really close enough. School uniforms all looked the same to her and this uniform looked tailored enough to pass as a suit if you ignored the obnoxiously embroidered crests.

 

“Has school started for you already?” Sorscha said. She still had another week or two left herself. Luca was spending his suspended between a burning desire to seize life by the horns to do as much as possible before the fires of youth fizzled out and an equal desire to laze around and watch reruns on TV. It seemed a little cruel to make students run around in blazers with the weather like this, though.

 

“Just a formality,” Kaltain said. She fluffed the blazer up a little and folded it over her arm. “Opening ceremony. Orientation. They made me give tours. Have to look the part. But the face completes the fashion, you know. So no matter what spin they put on the uniform this year, I’ll still look good.”

 

She tugged on the collar of her shirt. The crisp knot of her tie, every line clean and sharp, pressed into her neck. And there were a lot of clear lines. The tie was mostly black with a broad stripe of red, just one, running down the right third of it, like banners draped down some castle on TV. Sorscha had seen Luca in a tie, once, when he was escorting his girlfriend to a sister or a cousin’s wedding or something, but he’d been too stubborn to ask Emrys or Malakai how to tie the tie and fashioned some kind of lumpy, skewed knot himself after watching a video tutorial online. Kaltain’s knot, even dragged down by a disgruntled hand, looked like a work of art, perfect and sharp no matter how much she clawed at it.

 

In the late heatwave that had decided to break the previous weeks almost transition into autumn, Sorscha could understand her discomfort.

 

Kaltain tugged again but didn’t bother to do much with the tie. Sorscha noted how slim and long her fingers were.

 

“Okay then,” she said in the absence of anything else. Kaltain took to petty conversation filler in stride. She’d probably been on receiving end of a lot of it that day.

 

Kaltain tugged at the collar of her shirt this time instead. Sorscha wanted to tell her to just undo a few buttons if it annoyed her that much, but her brain stopped her after realising how that would sound. The knot of tie had managed to inch down, still perfectly formed.

 

“I need air conditioning,” Kaltain muttered, still remarkably articulate and dignified despite the red flush creeping up her neck to her cheeks and around her nose. “Let’s just go inside.”

 

They waited in front of the door until Sorscha opened it for her.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Kaltain seemed more civil today. Maybe that was the incorrect phrase. She was always pretty civil, albeit in a fake way: full of polite niceties that prompted people to really want to punch someone, or equally suggested a deep, buried urge to punch other people.

 

Today she was more quiet.

 

The coffee shop was even quieter today than last time too. The summer heat suffused into it and no windows had been cracked open. Kaltain’s shook her shirt by the collar again, trying to geta breeze to run through it. Futile, considering it was still tucked neatly into the skirt. She shifted in her seat, frowning. The sun glared in, the sign decals on the window casting irregular shadows across her face.

 

“I hate the summer,” she said, off-hand. “The heat is awful and not enough of the buildings in Rifthold are built to handle it.”

 

True enough, the thick stone and concrete walls soaked in the sun like ovens.

 

“Well, global warming and all,” Sorscha said.

 

Kaltain defaulted to fanning herself with a menu lying on the table.

 

Sorscha ordered what she was pretty sure was the same drink as last time. The waiter, she was quite sure, was also the same too.

 

Kaltain didn’t bother with a hot drink this time, at least. It was something clear and amber and in a plastic cup beaded with condensation despite arriving in record time. Kaltain wiped away the water and rubbed her fingers dry on her uniform with a look of distaste.

 

So she did normal people things like that too. Sorscha had assumed her manners would be impeccably trained, finishing school perfect, the kind of person who’d eat a burger with a knife and fork (if she deigned to eat food like that at all). Maybe it was the heat, or maybe Sorscha wasn’t worth trying for. She had the suspicion it would be the latter.

 

Sorscha sipped at her drink politely, waiting for her signal to start talking or an interview question to prompt something. It wasn’t hard. The drink was very good.

 

Kaltain kept pulling up and down on the collar of her shirt. Sorscha wished she would just untuck it and move on. Kaltain took one try of her drink and put it down, frowning. She really should have thrown decorum to the wind and undone her tie, or unbutton the collar at least. After each bout of tugging and adjusting, she’d smooth the clothes back down to near perfection, as though she hadn’t been fiddling with the stiff starched fabrics at all, almost immaculate.

 

Sorscha broke first. “We can switch seats,” she offered. “I think mine’s cooler.”

 

“No,” Kaltain said, staring out the window. “I’m bored. Let’s go somewhere else.”

 

 _You just got here_. Sorscha hesitated. “Okay.”

 

“Do you like museums?”

 

“Um, yes.” Thank the gods she hadn’t made it seem like a question. Something told her Kaltain was in exactly the mood to pick apart pedantic little mistakes like that.

 

“Great.”

 

Before Sorscha could even contemplate what pocket she had kept her bus pass in, Kaltain threw down some notes of money and stepped out of the door without a second word. Sorscha followed her blindly at a loss of what else to do. The bell attached to the top of the coffee shop door rung to signal their departure and as soon as she heard it, it seemed like a taxi had already swung by the curb. She didn’t even know when Kaltain had managed to call it.

 

Kaltain opened the door and slid into the side.

 

“Well?” she said. She patted the seat next to her. “Are you coming?”

 

Sorscha just hoped she wouldn’t have to pay any cab fare.

 

* * *

 

 

She didn’t. Kaltain saw it as part of the expense record. Sorscha was paying her with ‘the pleasure of her company’ but Kaltain was still responsible for how that company would go. That was what she was told. Kaltain was on her phone for most of the car ride, tapping away at the touchscreen in speeds that made Sorscha not a little bit dizzy. She got carsick reading anything. How Kaltain managed to rattle out virtual essays on that tiny screen was beyond her.

 

Kaltain waited until they were in the cab to ask, “Do you like art?”

 

It was more of a polite formality than anything else. She’d already told the driver to head to the National Gallery. Sorscha doubted the destination would change with her answer. She would have been fine, honest, whether they’d gone there or to a history museum instead. She liked the quiet. The display was a bonus.

 

“I guess,” Sorscha said. Why she went with honesty instead of an equality polite formality reply of ‘Yes, I sure do’ was beyond her. She bit her tongue.

 

“At least you’re honest.”

 

Kaltain set her phone down. Sorscha idly wondered if that was a sign she should be looking out for: like crosshairs locking on to a target, a shift in focus, a glove being tossed at someone’s feet. Or maybe just Kaltain’s eyes getting strained against the LCD glare.

 

She rubbed at them and sighed. It did not smudge her eyeliner in the slightest.

 

“You’re allowed to speak, you know,” Kaltain said. She picked up her phone and checked the time, but didn’t do much else with it, tucking in onto her lap.

 

The taxi driver didn’t have any radio playing. Sorscha would have taken anything to fill up the silence. There was only the whoosh of air as the car cut through the streets and Kaltain’s unenthused stare, waiting.

 

“I don’t have anything important to say,” Sorscha admitted at last.

 

It wasn’t enough to placate Kaltain. “I’m sure you can think of something.”

 

“Aren’t you supposed to be the one asking me questions?”

 

The corner of Kaltain’s lips edged up. “We’re off to a good start already.”

 

Sorscha just frowned.

 

The taxi driver cleared his throat. Sorscha, startled, jerked back in her seat. Kaltain gave her a pitying look and returned to her phone.

 

A phone alert blared. Sorscha looked. Not Kaltain’s.

 

The driver cleared his throat again. “‘Scuse me if I—”

 

“Do as you like,” Kaltain said, with a ‘gracious’ bow of her head. As if in answer to her prayers, the driver turned the radio on to a channel where two presenter began chattering introductory commentary to some sporting match. Sorscha looked out of her window and wondered just how many favours with the gods she’d wasted on this small victory.

 

Kaltain was still enamoured with her phone, insensible to Sorscha’s distress.The phone was on its front facing camera aoo. Kaltain checked her face at different angles and patted her face. She had a bag with her, with an actual honest to god handkerchief that she used to dab away some of the sweat and shine on her forehead that had developed in the heat.

 

Coverage of a sporting game murmured out of the radio and Kaltain either found it too distracting or too bothersome to speak over it. Sorscha strained her neck staring out the window and taking pains not to make eye contact with her but after the sting of trying to maintain a stressful nonchalance wore too thin, she relented to just sitting still and facing forward in her seat. Then when she got too bored and nervous about not knowing what her rich host was doing, looked in that direction.

 

Kaltain rubbed circles on her temple and sighed. She rubbed her fingers against the fabric of her shirt. When the air-conditioning had her looking a tad less pink than she had been when she entered, she completely undid her tie and then redid it in a swift flurry of practiced motions, fixing the creases and kinks that had formed from tightening and loosening it too much back at the coffee shop. Her fingers were as obnoxiously confident as the rest of her and didn’t betray any sort of subtle contradictions or hidden depths. She didn’t know why she found that so disappointing.

 

“I know how to tie symmetrical knots,” Kaltain said, catching her looking. “I didn’t tie it like this because it’s easier. It looks better with a four-in-hand. The tie is thin already with this uniform and the stripe is asymmetrical too so it needs to be balanced out. It’s an aesthetic choice.”

 

“Um, okay,” Sorscha said. She hadn’t really noticed.

 

“I know how to tie symmetrical knots,” Kaltain insisted.

 

“Okay,” Sorscha repeated. “I believe you.”

 

Sorscha wondered if it was a sensitive rich kids worried about: people judging their tie knots.

 

Kaltain gave her a sideways glance and undid her tie again. She was moving, crossing the front pieces over each other to tie it up, but Sorscha intervened and held out a hand. She was going to stop it manually, putting her own hand, well, where else but on top of Kaltain’s ones to get her to stay still and stop fidgeting but the moment before skin met skin she had a startling moment of clarity and her hand jerked down to jerk the tie down out between Kaltain’s fingers. Her grip, it seemed, wasn’t half as strong as it seemed. Very light and delicate. Just enough to keep things in place where she needed them. Efficient might have been the word. Sorscha decided it suited her.

 

“Just leave it alone,” Sorscha said, voice weakening along with her conviction to commit to the sentence. She trudged through anyway. “You don’t have to wear it anymore, right?”

 

The weather was too warm. It just seemed miserable to watch her keep doing that. Sorscha saw in the opening of her collar, only one button undone, that the places around her neck were the kind of irritated red that skin only got when someone had been rubbing or scratching at a place too much. Sorscha looked back down at the sturdy silk of the tie, slack in her fingers.

 

Kaltain tugged the tie back out of her hand.

 

“You never know who’ll be looking.”

 

Sorscha frowned.

 

“But fine.” Kaltain sighed, rolled up the tie and put it away in her bag. “We’re almost there, anyway. What’s you favourite food?”

 

It just whiplash with this girl.

 

She had initially thought Kaltain was just quieter than usual, but this rapid change from place to place, topic to topic, was just throwing her off. Maybe Kaltain wanted that. Maybe it was just the whims, not thought out but just instinctual, of someone so entitled to getting their way they didn’t pay heed to maintaining any sort of cogency. But Kaltain liked efficiency too much for that. It was the impression Sorscha had received anyway, that first night at the police station after Kaltain had neatly rounded out all the minutia of their arrangement. So was she just in a poor mood?

 

The taxi pulled over. They walked into the museum. At least this time, the door was already open.

 

* * *

 

 

“Student card,” Kaltain said, without looking up at her or the lady behind the counter minding the ticket sales. Sorscha kept looking around the high domed ceilings of the museum, admiring the plastering and relief around every high, curved pillar.

 

“Huh?”

 

“Student card,” Kaltain repeated, holding hand out to collect it. Again, she didn’t both making eye contact. “Hurry up, I want the discount.”

 

“Oh, right.” Sorscha obliged. It was lucky she carried it around with her today. Well, not exactly lucky since she did it in case anyone questioned her discounted bus fare (which was reallythe only means she had off getting to all the places Kaltain asked her to go) be anyway this fortuitous alignment of circumstances seemed to mean that fate was turning into her favour. That seemed…less unpleasant than the alternatives.

 

Kaltain, to her surprise, didn’t scrutinise the photo on her student ID card. It was for the best since it was a terrible photo. She was curious as to what Kaltain might have said, but not curious enough to broach the subject when Kaltain could very easily turn that into some snide remark or insult.

 

Kaltain paid their admission. The lady at the counter handed them some maps and an informative leaflet about the current exhibit. Kaltain picked them up with her change and then handed the offending pieces of paper to Sorscha right off the bat.

 

“Do whatever you like with those,” she said, and started walking towards the entrance where another staff member was checking tickets. Sorscha trailed after her, wondering if she should throw the papers in the recycling before deeming that a waste both of time and printing effort. She resolved to read the information at a later date and hurried behind Kaltain before the ticket guy would think that her plus one had mysteriously disappeared.

 

“Downstairs first. Working your way up is nice, isn’t it? Feels very aspirational, somehow,” Kaltain droned on.

 

Sorscha wondered when, if at all, Dorian would have to come to play in this at all. There was no complaining on that front. All the better if she just got to see a museum as payment. She could never find the time or inclination to go to these places alone. Then she realised that while Kaltain had specified a number of meetings, Sorscha had never bothered to clarify how long those meetings were supposed to be.

 

She realised only then, trailing behind Kaltain (whose long legs, a plus from her taller height, also let her walk much faster than one might initially expect) that Kaltain had shoved her a pile of leaflets and maps and receipts, but not her student ID. It must have been zipped into the folds of Kaltain’s wallet-purse thing. (Sorscha didn’t know the name. Was that bad? Was she supposed to know about things like that? Was there an actual difference? They were all just wallets, right? Even the big, long, designer ones that people like Kaltain carried.)

 

The student ID was being held hostage now and foreseeably would be until whenever Kaltain decided this meeting had concluded. Sorscha hoped so. (She filed a mental note to ask Kaltain for it back.)

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

“Pick a direction,” Kaltain said. “We’ll start there.”

 

“Huh?”

 

“A direction,” Kaltain repeated. “A room. An exhibit space. Any one. We can start there.”

 

Sorscha looked at what she was still carrying in her hands from their time buy entrance tickets. It was a map. She squinted at it trying to figure out where they currently were. What exhibit would be nice?

 

“Well, hurry up,” Kaltain prodded.

 

Sorscha panicked. She pointed to archway at the far end, where there seemed to be far fewer people walking towards. “Um, that one.”

 

“Of course you’d pick that one,” Kaltain complained.

 

Was Sorscha expected to pick another? Was she disappointed? Should Sorscha be concerned she was disappointed? “We could go somewhere else.”

 

“No, you picked that one. It’s fine. Come on.”

 

It wasn’t as quiet as she’d thought from a distance. The archway entrance was tall, and intricately carved out of glittering white marble, covered with geometric grooves and rune-line marks of writing Sorscha didn’t recognise, but the passage to the exhibit itself was narrow. She glimpsed a small flicker of the sign marking the name to the exhibit. _Ellywe and the South_. Did they have to share a space?

 

A school group was exiting as they entered, so they had to stand to the side, waiting their turn to get through one of the narrow passages that opened up into the next exhibit space. Sorscha pressed herself against the wall to allow easy clearance for the throngs of school children, even though it meant jammed her rib, hard, against the hand railings mounted there. Kaltain leaned, absently, against the rails instead. She had one hand in her bag, rifling around for something, not very happy, either because she couldn’t find it, or because of the crowd.

 

The school children were all loud. Kaltain winced and mumbled about a headache and bright colours. Indeed, all the children were wearing brightly coloured hats. Sorscha wondered if this was even proper school, or a play school that had arranged a special trip. They all looked tiny.

 

Their flag-waving guide shepherding around the children looked haggard and, looking at the sight of the large number of children and the scarcity of supervising adults, Sorscha could imagine. The group slowly filtered through.

 

Kaltain’s expression shifted from mild annoyance to blank indifference. Perhaps she didn’t like children. Sorscha couldn’t help but be amused at the way some of them waddled through, hands steadying the straps of their backpacks.

 

She was letting herself get cheered a little by the parade of red faced children, marching two by two, holding hands on their way out, and so caught up by their cute faces she didn’t notice when the group ended and a different one began.

 

There was little other way to put it: a group of well dressed rich kids walked past.

 

A throng of them. No, more accurately, a pack of them. Sorscha didn’t know much about fashion, but she remembered seeing the logos all over their handbags (and hats and shirts and even their shoes) before.

 

‘Kids’ might have been too dismissive. Maybe they were about Sorscha’s age.

 

The boys amongst them hadn’t looked particularly tall, although they walked as if they all thought they were. Some had gold chains hanging around their necks, or were wearing black rings and those big chunky black things on their wrists — the ones that were on trend. (Bracelets? Bra _cers?_ Smart Watches? She really didn’t know whatever they were. She only knew because Luca had pointed it out once when flicking through his phone, sprawled out on the couch, and complained how bad they looked. Also that some were studded with actual honest to god _diamond and gold_ , should anyone really have such an ungodly amount of money to burn.)

 

The girls had been wearing thick makeup on: eyeliner sharp enough to cut a man, a haze of smoky eyeshadow that looked like something Sorscha had only seen possible on posts Luca’s girlfriend would sometimes show her when she visited to dinner, and was that foundation or was their skin really that perfect? The girls all looked like they could be models. The boys less so. But will all of them, there was something snide in their air about them and how high each of them held their heads.

 

Kaltain observed them in a way that was too neutral and cool to be too true. Her head tilted a fraction of angle. Sorscha thought she was imagining things until she saw it drop a little more. Kaltain scratched the side of her face, right near the sharp line of her jaw. It made her look small.

 

“You know them?” Sorscha asked.

 

Kaltain looked out through the hallway, lingering. “Not at all.”

 

“Those girls were so pretty,” Sorscha said, dazed. It had felt like celebrities walking past. Were those celebrities? Luca would kick her if he knew she’d walked past a bunch of celebrities and not taken a picture for him. ‘ _That’s what a phone is for!_ ’ he’d say.

 

Kaltain blinked. She said, “Prettier than me?”

 

Huh?

 

“Are they prettier than me?” Kaltain repeated. Sorscha thought she must have been in a daze. She couldn’t be hearing right, surely. “Are they?”

 

Um.

 

There was no right answer to this. Only, there was and it was probably Kaltain but that answer seemed so obvious it was like the set up to another cruel joke Kaltain had up her sleeve, a trap that was going to make Sorscha squirm.

 

“Um,” Sorscha said.

 

Kaltain snickered and turned on the ball of her foot to look up at the huge canvas hanging on the wall. She tucked both hand behind her back, holding them there, like some ingenue admiring the artwork. “Just joking. What’s with that terrified expression on your face?”

 

Sorscha didn’t know either.

 

Kaltain just shrugged. Her usual practiced smile returned to her face. She laughed. “Don’t worry so much about it. I know I’m prettiest, after all.”

 

Sorscha didn’t say anything. It didn’t sound like joking, as much as boasting, but maybe it was joking? From anyone else she would have been able to say it was a joke. Kaltain made it sound like an absolutely level fact, like listing the capital city of country or the colours of a flag.

 

“Your uniform’s pretty,” Sorscha blurted out instead, for that was all the connection her brain could conjure up to keep driving away the silence. Kaltain hated silence, didn’t she? She complained incessantly about how dull Sorscha was for never talking when Sorscha’s one job here was to talk. She winced immediately. Silence might have been preferable. “It’s a nice school uniform.” 

 

Oh god why couldn’t she just stop herself. In every other facet of her life she knew when to just shut up. Why not here?

 

Kaltain, venerable narcissist that she was, leaped on the chance to talk about her own things. Sorscha could be be glad for that, at least.

 

“The uniform is flashy. It suits me very well, do you agree?” Kaltain said.

 

Not the way normal people would talk. They’d just end the sentence, ‘wouldn’t you agree?’ or ‘don’t you think?’ or something else just as rhetorical. ‘Do you agree?’ sounded like Kaltain actually wanted to hear an answer with substance, though. ‘Do you agree?’ was like the prompt to an essay, or the stilted phrasing of a question to frame a debate topic in a tournament.

 

“I suppose,” Sorscha said simply, examining the room instead of Kaltain. If the other girl was offended by the short answer, she gave no indications of it.

 

Crowd watching had been a sort of hobby for Sorscha. It hadn’t been out of choice, at first, but now that she didn’t always have to do it, she quite enjoyed it just as the sort of relaxing recreational activity other people did. This museum had a whole variety of people coming and going, staying and sitting and making laps, quick and slow, of the place. Even if the art wasn’t here wasn’t to her taste, she would probably just have enjoyed parking herself on a bench and watching the world go by. She couldn’t let Kaltain know that she liked it here, though. She didn’t know why, but she really didn’t want to.

 

“I like this uniform, you know?” Kaltain shared, talking more to the air.

 

Sorscha wondered, on more than one occasion, if she was actually just being rented out so that when Kaltain talked to herself it was more like she was talking to other people, albeit in a very dispassionate, aloof way. (She’d read story once, where the weary middle-aged protagonist, agonising over his loveless marriage, kept hiring prostitutes to play cards with him — just for the company of it. It had not been a terribly compelling story.)

 

Kaltain went on, lifting one of the labels of the blazer, black piped with a shinier, satiny black that was hard to notice at first, but very tasteful the more she looked at it. “It’s flashy, but you can still tell it’s a school uniform. It’s obvious in that sense. I really appreciate that.”

 

 _‘Why?’_ the unvoiced sentiment hanging in the air between them. Sorscha didn’t say it, but maybe she thought it loud enough for Kaltain to know it was her question. Maybe it was just in built to the sentence. Maybe Kaltain just read something in her face. Or maybe Kaltain just liked talking.

 

“When I was in middle school, I used to get into taxis and the drivers would ask me about the economy.It took me a while to get it.”

 

Sorscha could respond when prompted. Kaltain was just telegraphing the responses now. _Beggars can’t be choosers_. “Why did they ask you about that?”

 

“They thought I worked in a bank. The uniform looked like a suit, you see. I did use a designer handbag as my schoolbag so there _was_ that… It still felt a bit strange though. People say all sorts of things to adults that they’d never say to kids. Feeling grown up felt…rewarding, even if it wasn’t necessarily nice. Some things in life are like that, I suppose.”

 

Dorian had mentioned a similar feeling once or twice. When he dressed himself in his finest suit, and walked down a literal red carpet, flanked by a sea of flashbulbs, for the first time not trailing at the heels of his mother and instead leading his little brother down by his hand. When his father had first seen fit to teach him how to drive, or at least know how it felt to be sitting in the driver’s seat — in a garage, to be sure, but his father had shunted the whole seat far forward for his then skinny, reedy, short limbs and Dorian had been a good boy and pressed, ever so gently, to let the car slowly lurch forward. Then he’d gotten queasy at the thought of piloting such a giant hunk of metal, recalled a car crash he’d seen in an action movie he wasn’t meant to be seeing with Chaol the week before, and slammed on the brake until the car shuddered to an abrupt stop, that threw his father forward almost as much as that one horse did at the Meah Horse Trials the year before.

 

Dorian hated telling stories about his father, but sometimes he couldn’t help himself and he recalled them anyway. Sorscha didn’t pretend to understand whatever it was between them, only that one day that creeping, poisonous cold finally sent them adrift like chunks of a glacier, a century’s deep fracture finally cleaved apart from the impact of a sinking ship.

 

She could have told Kaltain any of that. Maybe that was what she wanted. Instead, Sorscha said, “I wouldn’t know.”

 

Kaltain looked at her curiously, and shrugged. “If you say as much.”

 

Sorscha looked down at her clothes. “I don’t recall wearing school uniforms. I suppose I must have. All the school’s in Fenharrow have them.”

 

Kaltain’s voice was composed. “That’s true. The school’s in Adarlan, not so much, though.”

 

“Yes,” Sorscha agreed. “After coming here, I don’t ever remember seeing one. Well, apart from schools like…” She gestured vaguely at Kaltain. She probably didn’t have to be so explicit about it. There was hardly anyone else in the space, not even a guard around, who Kaltain thought she might have been pointing out instead.

 

Sorscha grew aware of how _empty_ this section of the museum seemed to be. She tapped the heel of her shoe against the polish floor. The dull thud echoed a few time. There was no sound of footfall, or breathing, or that patter of thumbs against smartphone glass screens.

 

She saw Kaltain stiffen, only because of the way the muscles in her jaw tensed for a passing second, and clutch the strap of her bag a little tighter, tucking the blazer in a little harder again her. Looking at something.

 

“Stand here for me,” Kaltain said, shifting her into position by the shoulders. It was another uncomfortable reminder about the difference between them, authority made tangible by height and how easily Kaltain had just _moved_ her and how easily Sorscha had just let herself be moved, feet stepping placidly to keep up with the torso they were attached to. Kaltain looked up thoughtfully, stroking her chin as she made a ‘hmm’ noise. She nudged Sorscha’s shoulder, prompting a small rotation.

 

“Just like that,” she said.

 

This wing of the museum seemed almost abandoned. A section dedicated to the ancient and traditional art of Ellwye, the profligacy of text written all around the walls in cramped fonts slapped together seemed to suggest even the curators hadn’t given much thought or care to the area, expect to get some mileage out of the artefacts they had acquired — things she didn’t recognise. _From the South, presumably._

 

It struck Sorscha as sad, this abandoned room. _Only children forced to go on school tours come through here, huh?_ Then she felt guilt, for not knowing what those strange, presumably Southern artefacts were. No wonder the management didn’t care. No one else did: a vicious cycle.

 

“Stand a little closer, would you?” Kaltain said in a way that really didn’t suggest is was a question apart from the grammar of it. “There’s a guy in the back keeps looking this way.”

 

It was hard to miss him. In the corner of the museum, a man kept flicking his head between a collection of statues carved out of now petrified black wood and the back of Kaltain’s head. The back of her head might have been a little to generous a judgement. He was looking a little lower that than, hands stuffed in his pockets, a bag strap slung across his chest.

 

Kaltain made a point to look right at her and smile as she talked. Any stranger looking at them might mistake them for friends. The man in the corner lost his nerve (along with his footing for a moment) and, with the sweat patches forming his shirt, left the room.

 

“That took forever,” Kaltain said. “Some of them just can’t take a hint.”

 

“Huh?”

 

Kaltain cast a scathing glance back at the spot where the young man had been lurking behind a pillar. “Hmph. ‘Of all the art in here, you’re the easiest on the eyes’. Have you ever been hit on like that at an art gallery?”

 

Sorscha could only assume the question was rhetorical.

 

Kaltain rubbed the back of her neck. “I only come for the paintings but I have to put up with that mess.”

 

“Oh,” Sorscha said, finally understanding. “Sorry.”

 

Kaltain tossed her hair back over her shoulder.“I know, right? What a tragedy to be young and beautiful.”

 

Sorscha went with the most typical route possible. She wasn’t sure what Kaltain was doing—something like the opposite of fishing for complements only not? Self-depreciating, seemingly, but not ironic at all.

 

“I’m sure you’ve been through your fair share of problems too,” Sorscha said, level and, she hoped, sincere.

 

“My father is rich and I was born pretty,” Kaltain said. “There are no difficulties in my life.”

 

Sorscha listened hard for the parts where her voice would go bitter or quiet. It did not. She replayed it in her head: a level, casual, off-the-cuff delivery more like an observation of the weather than any sort of self-depreciating joke. Kaltain’s ego was probably far above any capacity for self-depreciating humour. Maybe that was good for self-esteem. Sorscha could try it out, but she’d doubt she’d ever be able to stick to it.

 

There was a thud. Sorscha turned to the source of the noise; That young man again: having seemed to drop his book bag. His head was stuck around the corner, and he looked like a deer in the headlights. Kaltain looked at him too, the expression on her face icy.

 

He bolted.

 

Kaltain sniffed. “What a creep.”

 

Sorscha rubbed her arm. “He just wanted to talk to you.”

 

“While I’m wearing a school uniform?”

 

Sorscha pursed her lips. “He didn’t look that old.” She couldn’t remember, to be honest, but maybe he could have been as young as a university student.

 

“What a consolation,” Kaltain said. Sorscha regretted trying to argue her point. “If he wanted to talk, he should talk. Then I could just reject him off the bat and he could save me the discomfort of being gawked at.”

 

“I can’t blame him,” Sorscha said. She faltered, wondering if she should go through with it. Considering how much of a looks-obsessed narcissist Kaltain was shaping up to be, it might go down well. “Of all the pieces of art here, you’re—”

 

“I’m hungry,” Kaltain declared as interruption, looking at the final piece of art in the display with a blank expression.

 

It was a gargantuan canvas, stretching out over the whole wall, painted in subtle textures of white and grey with a haunting red square right in its centre. Modern art, by a painter from Banjali. Everything here just seemed to be thinly connected by a shared thread of geography with little arrangement beyond the passage of time. It must have been a recent one because it was at the end of the line. It was simple and clean, but somehow fascinating: how all those subtle flecks of grey and white in the background faded in and out of each other — something only really appreciated in real life. She knew now if she saw a picture of it online, it would never be as clear as this. That red square; it could have meant anything or nothing at all. Sorscha wanted to stare at it longer, but Kaltain started walking away and, afraid of getting lost, she followed.

 

“You have a sister too, I recall,” Kaltain said, facing forwards, not really caring if Sorscha heard it or not, not even looking behind her either.

 

“Sort of,” Sorscha said. “Kind of. Probably.” At Kaltain’s raised eyebrow, she added, “It’s being finalised.”

 

“You said as much last time. Do I get anything else to go on now?”

 

“No.”

 

“I suppose I can let it go.” Kaltain smiled, but only with her mouth. “Let’s get out of here. Nothing interesting in this exhibit. No wonder no one ever comes here.”

 

* * *

 

She didn’t understand what they were doing here. She didn’t really understand art. Kaltain walked through room after room, at a brisk pace, and Sorscha followed. Some of the paintings were very skilfully made, like looking at photographs, but Sorscha only could think of that red square on the giant, white and grey canvas.

 

Kaltain grew restless with her quiet. (Dorian couldn’t stand the quiet either, she knew, but she didn’t tell Kaltain that.)

 

“So.” As they walked out of a room filled with portraits of important people in Adarlan’s history (Sorscha had recognised some for the similarity to the faces on bank notes), Kaltain fished what seemed to be, an empty box of cigarettes out of her bag and tossing it into a litter bit in a quiet corner of a hallway linking exhibition spaces, in plain sight of every person walking up and down there, though no one paid her any attention.

 

“So?”

 

“So you only kind of ‘ _guess_ ’ you like art, hmm?”

 

“I…do?”

 

“It’s what you said in the car.”

 

_You remembered?_

 

“I…guess,” Sorscha said. _I sound ridiculous._

 

“So if it was on scale, yes to no, no in betweens, would you guess a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’?”

 

She wouldn’t be letting go of this, would she?

 

Sorscha replied, “I like art, but I’ve never really understood how to appreciate it. I don’t really know what I should look for, or what I should think about.”

 

“It doesn’t require you to be a snob to enjoy,” Kaltain said. “There are levels to it. Like with listening to music, even if it’s just because you like if for a reason you can’t quite place, it’s valid.”

 

She tilted her head and took a step back.

 

“What are you doing?”

 

“Thinking,” Kaltain said, wry and dry. “I tend to do it quite often. It’s become a terrible habit. Not ideal at all for girls in my position.”

 

“I don’t think you should make jokes like that. It makes me I feel uncomfortable,” Sorscha blurted out.

 

“Why?”

 

Sorscha didn’t say anything.

 

“Iif you can’t answer that question, do you think that I would stop if you asked? Do you think I care that you’re uncomfortable?”

 

When she didn’t reply again, Kaltain went on.

 

“This isn’t any kind of threat,” Kaltain said, bland, if slightly annoyed. “I’m asking you a question.”

 

“I…don’t know.”

 

“Then what was your intention for saying that?”

 

“W-what’s _your_ intention for asking me about it?” Sorscha attempted to challenge.

 

“Was it because it sounded sexist?” Kaltain said.

 

“What?”

 

“The joke. That girls should think. Come on, it’s funny.”

 

Sorscha didn’t say anything.

 

Kaltain gave a small laugh. “I guess you really don’t understand what’s happening here either.” She threw her head back, looking up somewhere with an enigmatic smile. “I really must be bored.”

 

“You must be.”

 

Kaltain gave a wistful sigh. “Let’s go back to talking about the art, shall we?”

 

“Is that what we were talking about?” (Oh gods, she was mess. She’d never be defending Dorian’s secrets in this sad state.)

 

“You said you thought you didn’t know how to appreciate art. I told you appreciating art is a matter of perspective.”

 

“And your authority on this is?”

 

“Stating qualifications for having that opinion would undermine my premise that no fancy qualifications are necessary to appreciate it,” Kaltain said. She tilted her head. “Kudos to you if that was the angle you were trying to trap me from.”

 

Kaltain clapped softly. Sorscha felt mocked. This felt like deliberate mocking that she was not misinterpreting rather than joke mocking. Her expression must have flashed, chagrin and annoyance, because Kaltain gave another little snorting chuckle of laughter and had to look away for a moment before composing herself.

 

“I was raised to have a certain appreciation of these things, that’s all,” Kaltain said. “At the very least, I need to know how to make conversation about it.”

 

“Could you make conversation with me?”

 

“I could,” Kaltain said, “but would you really want me to? You seem bored enough. Besides, I paid you to make conversation with me, didn’t I?”

 

It sounded so bad when she brought it up like that. Some moments she spent with Kaltain were comfortable enough to forget the only reason they spoke was to make up for dropped criminal charges and a bail payment. The feeling that welled up in the pout of her stomach, well below the gurgling of acid there, seemed disembodied from the rest of her — a floating that she didn’t quite want to pin back down to the tangible.

 

“I never understood much of what I was supposed to do in places like this,” Sorscha said. She paused. “You do.”

 

“I do.”

 

She really just wasn’t going to take the bait, was she? Kaltain’s eye sparkled with amusement. Sorscha would just have to keep on going. “I would like it if you’d demonstrate.”

 

“And why should I?”

 

 _Think about something she’d like_. “You’d prove Nehemia wrong.”

 

“Oh? How so?”

 

“We spoke. She said you…had a reputation.”

 

She had no idea what that particular phrase actually _meant_ but it suitably provoked Kaltain.

 

“Nehemia needs to get off her high horse,” Kaltain scoffed. “As though she’s any less proud than me when she’s around people she doesn’t like.”

 

“I like Nehemia,” Sorscha said, which might have been as close to a defence of her as she could muster. “She’s nice.”

 

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Kaltain stopped to examine a picture on the wall. Sorscha looked too.She didn’t get it.

 

“How is this even art?” Sorscha said.

 

In the frame that Kaltain was looking at, there was a drawing that looked very neatly perfect. A drawing of a pipe. There was a caption to it. It read ‘This is not a pipe’. Sorscha was not particularly impressed by the statement.

 

“It’s modern art,” Kaltain replied. “Art doesn’t have to be pretty to be art. That’s what these sorts of things are dealing with. The discussion they’re trying to start.”

 

“It sounds difficult to understand.”

 

“It’s not difficult to understand,” Kaltain said. “It just needs a little explaining. If it were actually difficult to understand, then it would have failed its purpose as art. Anything needlessly inaccessible is like that. It doesn’t have to be sledgehammer blunt, but it doesn’t have to require two degrees and a researched dissertation to understand.”

 

She would have thought Kaltain’s tastes would be a little more elitist. But they weren’t. It seemed like a reasonable perspective to have.

 

“Then again,” Kaltain said, “It’s a bit easier to have a conversation based on things other people have talking about before. Like writing essays at school. Things with a history are quite interesting, wouldn’t you say?”

 

 _That_ seemed like it was loaded with more things that just asking Sorscha’s opinion on art.

 

“The provenance of it is as of as much significance as the thing itself. It’s why I tend to like the older works more. They’ve already had their eras dissected to hell and back,” Kaltain went on. (Maybe Sorscha was overthinking. Maybe she wasn’t realpolitik given terrifying, corporal tangibility in teenage girl form. Maybe she, as treasonous as it seemed to think, she was just a rambling nerd.) “The current surrounding the current things is still changing and being written. Makes me a tad nervous. Ah, but when you consider the state of documentation between now and then, you could always make the case that the context of today’s artists is even richer than the past. Like that scenery painting I lectured you about before.”

 

“That’s nice,” Sorscha said, only half-paying attention. _Did she just say ‘lecture’? Is this on purpose?_

 

“Is it really?” Kaltain rolled her eyes. “I basically just said I prefer it when someone else has done all the heavy thinking for me.”

 

“Um, well, that’s kind of—”

 

“Look at this again,” Kaltain interrupted.

 

Sorscha felt very disoriented. Was this just a monologue? Was this like actually discount proxy therapy? Well, a deal was a deal…

 

Sorscha looked up at where Kaltain was gesturing. The picture looked the same. (There was no trick of angles that changed it, like this sculpture she’d seen once in Galanthynius Park made up of sheets of cut steel, spaced out to look different depending on where you were standing.) The picture itself, an ink drawing or a print or something like that, was a simple, very diagrammatical in a way and it reminded Sorscha of those illustrations in old science textbooks that you’d see on TV. (She’d never seen one in person in reality, but it seemed an apt descriptor.)

 

Kaltain looked at her. Did she need to be making a noise?

 

“Oh.”

 

“What do you see?”

 

…A pipe?

 

“Because it’s not a pipe,” Kaltain continued with her creepy, patronising telepathy. “It’s a drawing of a pipe. And a drawing is just a collection of lines put together to by the person drawing it. What we see is just our interpretation. To put it this way, if you draw a picture of a turd and then show it to your bother and he sees a penis, then is the drawing a turd or a penis? You would say a turd, because that was your intention. He would say a penis because that’s what he sees. We might argue the creator’s intention supersedes that of any viewer, but if we show it to one hundred people and they all think it’s a penis, then what does that say?”

 

Sorscha did not even have time to reply. Kaltain went ahead and jumped into the following space for conversation.

 

“Probably that society has some sort of phallus obsession.” Kaltain smiled smugly to herself, clearly pleased beyond measure with her disappointing joke.

 

“I see,” was all Sorscha said.

 

Kaltain frowned at that, then looked around the room, then looked at a map of the museum floor mounted to a wall, then looked back at Sorscha. Sorscha was unsure if she liked that look.

 

“Come this way then.”

 

She didn’t know where Kaltain was walking, down the stairs or down the halls, but she just followed, taking in the sight of all the people stopping in front of various paintings in grand gold frames and wood frames and behind class cases out of her peripheral vision until Kaltain stopped so abruptly in front of her that Sorscha almost smashed into her back.

 

She didn’t, thankfully. She stopped herself just short, but it was still _too_ close. The summer heat was still clearly bothering Kaltain, because, face hovering so close to the other girl’s back, she could feel the warmth even through the blazer. It was embarrassingly intimate to notice. Sorscha pulled away and stepped to stand next to Kaltain, a safe distance away at that.

 

What were they looking at? The wall was awash with dozens of paintings, all in varying shaped and coloured frames. What were they looking at? The biggest? Sorscha peered at the description mounted beside the piece.

 

“A pastoral scene documenting the stark beauty of Terrasen’s mountain ranges,” she read aloud. “Working on untreated canvas with bold brush strokes representative of this movement, the artist captures not only the image, but the mood of the sublime is invoked in order to try and convey the ‘suffocating sense of grandeur and insignificance’ one feels at the mercy of unforgiving Mother Nature—”

 

“I’m not paying you to read things in small fonts for me,” Kaltain said. She sighed, perhaps over-dramatically, and Sorscha still wasn’t sure if she was joking or not. The reminder that she was here because it was a _payment_ stung at something. Probably her pride. “I wanted to hear interesting things and _this_ is all I get.”

 

Sorscha didn’t really see any way Kaltain could really ‘take back’ that payment, but she also didn’t want to try and find out if those suspicions really were groundless.

 

“Only tell me interesting things,” Kaltain said, reading the painting description instead of bothering to look at Sorscha, “or I’ll get bored of you.”

 

“You’re not bored now?”

 

“I’m getting there.”

 

She had to think of something. She wasn’t sure exactly _what_ would come of displeasing Kaltain. She’d gotten Luca out of lockup. Could it be possible she could put him back in?

 

Kaltain rubbed at her eye for a moment before giving up on the painting description.

 

Sorscha said, “Do you have trouble reading?”

 

“What?” Kaltain said, really meaning _excuse me?_

 

“What?” Sorscha said, really meaning _what did I say?_

 

“What,” Kaltain _stated_ , probably meaning, _get the hell on with it and tell me what you meant_.

 

“I just meant, since you brought it up and all. Do you have trouble reading things in small fonts?”

 

Kaltain crossed her arms. “Do you consider _this_ interesting conversation?”

 

Sorscha paused. She said, “I’m working my way up to it.”

 

Kaltain took a moment. Her eyes flickered with something that was either intrigue or irritability. She answered, at a breath, “Reading white on black gives me a headache. Especially on backlit screens.”

 

Sorscha looked back at the display. Indeed, all the signs were on mounted LED screens. Maybe it was easier than printing out new labels for all the exhibitions every time. It certainly looked neat and clean and she was all for supporting the paperless wave.

 

Sorscha said, “But actually they say that reading white on black in the more efficient reading method. The glare from the white screens causes a lot of people migraines too.”

 

“I just turn down the brightness.”

 

“Right. That too. But if you turn it down too much you get eye strain that way too because there’s not enough contrast. Um—” She wracked her brain trying to think of something. “But a lot of people are just getting more eyestrain these days. That’s just the direction that graphic design is taking. Actually, official design manuals for apps and web pages and stuff recommend a contrast level of about 7:1 — oh, this is on a ratio that this computer decides by examining the brightness levels of different colours against each other and if they’re the same it’s 1:1 and if it’s like black on white than it’s 21:1 — but in practice even the web pages that this advice is displayed on have rating of more around 5:1. And font weight is getting thinner these days too so it’s understandable that maybe someone who’s on the phone as much as you is having those kinds of problems.”

 

Was that… Did that last part sound like an insult?

 

She looked at Kaltain’s face, guarded yet somewhat intrigued, albeit with her mouth curled into something between a smile and a sneer. Insult? Did she take it as an insult? Sorscha’s heart was starting to experiment beating with some _weird_ rhythms now.

 

“Hmm,” Kaltain said. “Getting vaguely interesting.”

 

Her tone of voice was so dry, Sorscha wasn’t sure if she was being sarcastic or genuine. This was definitely going to become a recurring problem.

 

“I, uh, um…” She’d derailed the topic. She needed to bring it back right now. “Well, what kinds of things do you see when you read white on black text for a long time?”

 

Kaltain blinked. Sorscha felt the expression on her face could only be read as ‘what the hell’ rather than anything else, though she’d yet to hear Kaltain ever swear in front of her. (That seemed fine and typical enough. They’d only met a few times, right?)

 

She was about so stutter out an apology for being weird, or possibly offensive, when Kaltain started talking. It took a beat, but it finally processed in her head that Kaltain was answering her question.

 

“It gets blurry. Like double images. The white text looks like it’s floating or there’s a double super-imposed image, like an after image, that’s green or purple and floating in front of the screen. Like the after image you get when you stare into the sun or a bright light seven after you close your eyes.” Kaltain closed her eyes, frowning. Her nose scrunched up along with it, but when her expression went back to something blank and neutral, there wasn’t a trace of cracked or creased foundation.

 

But she had to be, right? Unless she just had no pores naturally. (Okay, Sorscha was really bad at this.) She didn’t know if Kaltain had closed her eyes to better make a recollection or because just thinking about the problem was giving her a headache. Asking didn’t seem the most brilliant of ideas, but she couldn’t think of the justification for why that was.

 

“Do you wear glasses?” Sorscha asked, out of the blue. It came out more smoothly than she hoped, and so she refrained from labelling this a ‘blurt out’ moment.

 

Kaltain paused. Sorscha noted how she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She put one hand on her hip and used the other to adjust the strap of her bag, digging into her shoulder but not rumpling the clean line of her blazer. “Um, yes, I do.”

 

That was the first time Sorscha had ever hear her say some kind of filler word. ‘Um.’ Sorscha didn’t know why it was so surprising. Kaltain must have been only human too, after all.

 

Kaltain coughed and cleared her throat, trying to rebuild some of the aura that one utterance of ‘um’ had unwittingly shattered.

 

“Ah, yes, that was right,” Kaltain said, apparently talking to herself. She looked at Sorscha, a small scowl on her face. “You distracted me from my point.”

 

“What was you point?”

 

“This painting.”

 

“The pastoral scene of Terrasen’s mountains?”

 

“Terrasen?” Kaltain repeated. “What? No. I meant this one.”

 

She pointed to one right beside it. Much smaller. In a much less glamorous frame than Terrasen’s mountains.

 

“If you want to talk about pastoral scenes, this a pretty good one with more interesting things to discover than just how ‘free’ brush strokes capture a mood.”

 

Sorscha stood corrected though, because Kaltain took that moment to point and she realised she hadn’t been looking at the big battle scene edges with gold, but a smaller one, far higher up, framed in worn-down teak. A neat landscape of flat farmland stretching out under a blue sky, like a postcard.

 

“Do you know that one?” she said, a challenge. “If you think about it, it’s quite famous, but if you didn’t know that, wouldn’t you say it was awfully boring?

 

“Being boring was very much the point though. The artist was a soldier in the War of Liberation. He survived that very battle. When he came back, years later as an old man, and saw the field where so many of his friends had died an been buried, it just seemed like nothing. Just any other field. The villagers grew vegetables in that land. They said the soil was fertile. It might have been all the corpses in the ground, ground down to nothing by the worms, or maybe the soil had always been like that. He paced up and down the country side for a week looking to find the site of his worst memories only to realise he’d be trudging through them that whole time. No one would have ever guessed the horrors that happened ever happened there.

 

“When you see that painting, it doesn’t seem noticeable at all. The quality of the technique isn’t even that great either. But art historians did X-Rays of the painting, and if you look underneath, the under paining was done in vivid colours, blood reds and even corpses. The title is ‘Progress’. The process of painting it was as much an exercise for the painter to exorcise his demons as was the end result: a testament to how all human tragedy only depends on human memory. Time heals all, or maybe forgotten things don’t hurt. It depends on your interpretation.

 

“The technology to see through the paint wouldn’t be invented for another hundred over years,” Kaltain said. “Do you think the artist was a visionary banking on that innovation? Maybe he wanted to make two paintings but had to sell the other canvas. Maybe he gave up on his dream and just painted a pretty field so he could make some money. Bloody fields aren’t nice to hang up around the home, you know. Maybe he was hoping some clueless, out of touch rich merchant would buy his pretty painting without ever realising there was death underneath, mocking him.”

 

Kaltain clearly knew the answer, if there even _was_ one.

 

Sorscha paused. She said, “Was it?”

 

Kaltain smiled cooly, gave a sideways glance, kept her hands tucked neatly behind her, posture straight. “Here’s another interesting fact for you. The painter was a man from Fenharrow. The war had been fought against the Adarlan army. And the painting itself, of a beautiful patch of rolling flat land in the farming capital of Erelia, Fenharrow itself, was commissioned by an Adarlanian prince. Maybe it was a message from the painter to the Royal Family. This painting hung in the library, passed by that prince day after day for years and years. I wonder if it gave him any satisfaction, the painter, I mean. Knowing that.”

 

“What was all that stuff about the out of touch merchant then?”

 

“I’m just trying to sell a story here, Sorscha. Stories need their buildup. Otherwise the lesson just doesn’t carry through. No emotional gravitas.”

 

“What’s the lesson then?” Sorscha said snippily.

 

Kaltain ignored her tone. “A lot of people like to look at art just for the art. The artist is dead, and all. But to me, the only interesting part is the surrounding context. I don’t care much for looking at things just because they’re nice to look at.” She gestured to herself, up and down and centring on her face. “Isn’t that ironic? Well, perhaps I’m my own exception. It’s such a good face, isn’t it?”

 

“Sure,” Sorscha said and even she didn’t know which of those questions she was answering. “Yes, it is.”

 

She looked at the painting again: awash with muted, browned colours. Even the greens of the leaves, the blues of the skies. Washed out despite the thick, rich, viscousness of the pain on the canvas, painstakingly mixed to be that…dulled. A scene awash in grey light so rarely seen in the muggy Fenharrow heat. She thought about the soldier turned painters companions, under all the soil and paint. She thought about rot. She remembered the smell from the compost pile in their back garden, where Emrys would lovingly bury scraps and then Malakai would turn the pile. She remembered the smell from when she was small and her father turned the dirt in the fields, strewn with dead fish meant to fertilise the soil. She remembered the smell of gangrene and—

 

“So,” Kaltain said. “Did you believe me?”

 

“What?” Sorscha was in a daze.

 

“Did you believe me?” Kaltain said. “About the painting?”

 

“Why wouldn’t I?”

 

“Maybe I’m making it all up. You can’t see past the first layer of paint, right? I can’t either. So who’s to say any of that was true?”

 

Kaltain started to walk away. Sorscha fumbled, whipping her phone out of her pocket and trying to take a photo of the painting, of a caption, of anything that might be able to be used as an identifier, as quickly as she could while still keeping up with her unorthodox guide.

 

She’d asked for a conversation, after all. Kaltain had given her a whole lecture. Maybe that counted as a failure, but it was still interesting and it didn’t require Sorscha to participate and embarrass herself, so all in all she had to prefer this outcome.Sorscha resolved herself to check online at least later. She could remember that story even if she couldn’t remember what the painting’s name or the artist’s name were.

 

“I don’t know how to talk about art, and I don’t really think I get this,” Sorscha bit her lip. “But thanks for telling me about it anyway.”

 

“Oh,” Kaltain said, amused, maybe. Like she’d watched an interesting cat video on her phone. It was only a smile in passing. “Did you like that lesson? It was more on art history than art. It wasn’t even good. I should give you some actual advise. Just pay attention to composition and colours. That’s usually enough to get you thinking. It really doesn’t have to be complicated at all, Sorscha. You overthink everything. Though I suppose Dorian is like to do this same.”

 

“Mm… Sometimes, I suppose. But I’ve never really considered it overthinking. He has a lot of important things to consider.”

 

“I think I’m developing an allergy to teen boy angst.”

 

“He’s the crown prince,” Sorscha replied, only for Kaltain to murmur some vague noises of acknowledgment.

 

“Dorian likes books, doesn’t he?” Kaltain said. Rhetorical, she guessed, this time. Everyone knew Dorian liked books. Kaltain ended up answering herself, so Sorscha assumed she was correct. “All sorts, I seem to recall. Fiction and otherwise.”

 

Sorscha baited, “Did you look that up?”

 

“It doesn’t take much effort to know.”

 

True enough, if one bothered to look past the immediate media headlines splayed out on the news stand about Dorian’s exploits, one would fine a variety of other articles about his prolific book collection, his work with maintaining and restoring the Adarlan National Library and his community service at the National Archives, his patronage of charities for library upkeep and accessibility, especially in low income neighbourhood. Sorscha knew he hadn’t done those things just out a cynical desire to throw some water onto the fire of the playboy prince image. He was genuinely passionate about those things. And Kaltain was right, it wasn’t much news at all.

 

She didn’t know why she kept doing that—assuming even Kaltain’s smalltalk was a carefully engineered probe to siphon out new information. Even if they were, she could enjoy herself a bit weaving around them. When it came down to it, the information Kaltain was looking for wasn’t really the thing that could topple a government.

 

Smalltalk, then. Back to smalltalk. Better this, she supposed, than anything else.

 

“Do you like reading too, Kaltain?”

 

“These days, I do too much of it for it to be enjoyable.”

 

“School?”

 

Kaltain nodded, still picking apart a picture with her gaze before she ultimately decided she was done. She turned and began walking. “I don’t read much for pleasure these days. I read when I was younger. It wasn’t really for fun. We had these little books, reading logs, and they gave you sticker if you read more than a certain amount in a certain time. I just liked having more stickers than everyone else. Made sure I read them all properly. We had to write little reports and reviews to prove we’d actually read them. Our parents were supposed to sign and verify we were telling the truth, but I always forged that bit. Could have gotten one of the staff to sign it, but even then I knew that was a little sad. I was really proud. Reading comprehension levels above where it should have been for my age group. They stopped doing that when we were old enough. I suppose they thought forcing children to read wasn’t worth it after a certain point. We were all literate by then, anyway. That was good enough. Was it ever reading for pleasure at all then, I wonder? I just liked winning. I liked it when they called me smart too.” She smiled, rueful. “Stickers. I guess I’ve always been easy to manipulate. At least I’m honest about what I want. There are worse things to be in the world.”

 

Well, she certainly hadn’t expected the conversation to turn that direction.

 

Kaltain’s gaze snapped in her direction. Sorscha felt her posture snap upright in response, like she’d been caught sleeping in class, or staying up past her bed time.

 

“Don’t look so put out. Are you bored?” Kaltain didn’t sound convincing, exactly, but there was something to it that made Sorscha feel like she was a being talked to as an actual human being. The margin of expectation there was low, but it was something. “Did Dorian take you here too many times for you to be entertained?”

 

“This sort of thing isn’t really Dorian’s style.”

 

Kaltain raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow. (Not that her other eyebrow, the one that didn’t move, wasn’t also impeccable.) “I was under the impression he would appreciate this sort of thing.”

 

“He does, but…” She looked back down at the floor.

 

“I never knew the white floor tiling in this museum was so fascinating,” Kaltain said. “It doesn’t seem to be any kind of mosaic, but it’s hardly my specialty. Or is it the wiring? Do you have any expertise? I’m sure I would like to be enlightened as to the details that make it so enthralling.”

 

Sorscha looked up at Kaltain’s face. She looked back down. She had been staring at where the wall met the floor. Indeed, some stray wires from remodelling were tapped down there and pinned to the wall. It wasn’t the exhibit, just some slap-dash repairs before, presumably, proper renovations could be done. She flushed. “No, nothing, I just… What was the question again?”

 

She hoped Kaltain wouldn’t try the wiring question again.

 

“Dorian never took you here?” Kaltain said. She still didn’t want to answer this question either, but at least this was a serious one and not one making fun of her.

 

“He’d get recognised,” Sorscha said. “He didn’t like crowds like that so much. But when your face is plastered everywhere, it’s a bit hard to fly under the radar.”

 

“Prince or not, with a face like that, I’m surprised he could cross roads without causing traffic accidents.”

 

Sorscha wasn’t sure if she was supposed to laugh or not.

 

Kaltain put one hand on her hip and frowned. “I just meant he’s good looking.”

 

Sorscha paused, thinking of an appropriate response. “That he is.”

 

Kaltain looked her up and down, as though waiting for more. When Sorscha didn’t say anything else, her shoulders slumped. She straighter again: perfect posture. She clicked her tongue. “Too bad that’s all he has going for him.”

 

“ _Excuse me?_ ”

 

“That and the money, I suppose,”Kaltain went on. “But being born royal isn’t where all the money is at any more. And it’s not like Adarlan has oil money to work with. Quite a shame, quite a shame. Quite a pauper prince, or he will be at this rate, if he can’t learn to balance a budget properly.”

 

“ _What_?”

 

“What a shame. But at least he has his good looks. Although those might fade with time too. I mean, look at this father. Perhaps it’s all for the best. ‘Got to get out early while you can’. Isn’t that what they say?”

 

“Just wait a minute there,” Sorscha snapped. “Dorian is not just some good looking boy toy.” (Kaltain might have been choking back a laugh right at that or that strange gagging, wheezing noise might have been Sorscha’s voice getting jammed back down her trachea as her subconscious tried to decide if this really was a terrible idea and everything needed to get _shut down_ right now.) “He’s kind and brave and thoughtful and yes he kind of sleep around with a lot of people but there’s nothing wrong with that and he was doing his best to stop being the kind of boy who commodifies women into recreational amusements and he _thinks_ so much about what he can do with his life, he thinks about it all the time because when he finally looks back on how he spent his life and everything he could have been doing with it instead he just— He’s wonderful and tries hard and you can’t just say all he has is his good looks!”

 

“Well,” Kaltain said. “I see.”

 

“And he deserves the best.”

 

“Got it.”

 

“And he’s a nothing like what the news about him. Not like— He’s better. He’s good.”

 

“I’d disagree, but your point was noted.”

 

“Making snide remarks about him isn’t helping your case, you know.”

 

“On the contrary,” Kaltain said. “This is the most you’ve spoken all day. If I had to say it myself, you seem to be projecting.”

 

“I’m not projecting.”

 

“It sounds like you had an overinflated bad impression of him from gossip columns, then you met him and he was nice which shifted that into totally _over_ -estimating and blowing your impression of him completely in the other direction. At which point you actually began to know him and tire of him, at which point you felt rather poorly, presumably for having had your misjudgements swing about so _wildly_ and so—”

 

“Okay, okay,” Sorscha interrupted. “I don’t recall an armchair psychoanalysis being part of this arrangement.”

 

“I wouldn’t have to antagonise you so often if it weren’t the only way to get you to just open your mouth and speak,” Kaltain said, bristling. “And, besides, if you’re upset it must be true. Dorian was very much the same whenever they caught him doing something naughty with a girl, or otherwise, hmm? Or at least that’s what they say.”

 

 _That_ felt like a flagrant generality that _Kaltain_ should have known better than say. Couldn’t she relate? If she’d even an inkling of an idea what Dorian went through, getting flustered over fictional, ridiculous headlines.

 

“That’s not true!”

 

The sharp volume of her voice had attracted onlookers. Sorscha shrunk into herself and they turned away. Kaltain stood, still and composed as always. Like no one had turned in the first place.

 

“I think it’s not _false_ ,” Kaltain said.

 

“Not about Dorian.”

 

“Fine then, not about Dorian,” Kaltain conceded. “About you, then?”

 

She said it like an invitation, but Sorscha felt like it was a taunt.

 

She bit her tongue, feeling warm. “I— I just had this image of him, you know? I guess lots of people did. It really is like something out of a fairy tale. He’s tall and handsome and smart and kind, just like a prince out of a fairy tale and he’s a prince in real life to boot. Isn’t that just too many fantasies all together? It’s just unreal. And I didn’t understand why it was happening to me, why he’d even _look_ at me. And every thing he did just made it seem more unreal. At first it was nice but then—”

 

“The novelty wore off. That shiny package.”

 

“You don’t have to make it seem—”

 

“You didn’t like your present anymore so you threw it away.”

 

“I didn’t—”

 

Kaltain laughed again. Sorscha was starting to hate the sound.. “Just a joke. Just remember, this isn’t supposed to be about you. You’re just supposed to be snitching on your boyfriend, you know. All of this is unnecessary.”

 

“I _thought_ you liked provenience to your art.”

 

“And _you’re_ art?”

 

“No.” She was blushing, mortified. “I thought— I meant _Dorian_.”

 

“Oh, so you think _he’s_ art, hmm?”

 

She felt warmer if that were even possible. She told herself it was just because they’d left the room with strong air conditioning. The air was just stuffy here. Poor building planning, that was all.

 

“I don’t think either of you, however nice to look at, are on that level,” Kaltain said. “Besides, art doesn’t have to be enjoyable to view to be art. It doesn’t have to be enjoyable at all. But that’s the general preference, of course, isn’t it? When youthink ‘art’, you think ‘beauty’. Now _that’s_ something that’s more interesting to examine.

 

“But I’m getting distracted again. Too much of that today. I didn’t come to talk to you about the nuances of what constitutes art or its image in popular consciousness.”

 

“What _did_ you come her for, then?”

 

Kaltain closed her eyes while she smiled, a bit like she was composing herself, but more like she was taking a pause. Though trying to understand what she was thinking through her yes wasn’t exactly easy going, not being able to see them was unnerving in its own way too.

 

“I’d like to know, I think,” Kaltain said. The room was warm. It was cold. It was whatever temperature Sorscha wanted it to be because all she wanted to do was think about anything other than the way Kaltain looked that second. “Was Dorian Havilliard anything like me?”

 

“I don’t know,” Sorscha said. _No. Yes. I’m not qualified to answer that_. _Maybe._ And then, “Was?”

 

“Hmm.” Kaltain replied, in lieu of any words. It didn’t seem like it had been a slip of the tongue.

 

“I, um,” Sorscha said.

 

“What?”

 

“I’d like to ask a question.”

 

“Then ask it.”

 

“Well. I—” _Why are we really here? Why did you say ‘was’? What does that even mean? Why did I agree to this? Why is this so strange? Why Dorian? Why me?_

 

“You only get one. Hurry up.”

 

“I— That is— What I’d like to know— Would be— The thing—”

 

Kaltain’s face got overtaken, little by little, by scowls at the way Sorscha stuttered over her sentences until she led them away, perhaps a little sulky, to a quieter place.

 

Kaltain pretended to look at another painting but, morosely, kept glancing in the direction of the one they had to abandon, very much the part of a sulking child. Sorscha, in an odd turn of events that made her gut twist, found it more — endearing wasn’t the right word — humanising, though it shouldn’t have seemed out of sorts in the least for Kaltain to act entitled to view a painting and be upset she had to stop looking at it.

 

“Do you… _like_ Dorian?” Sorscha said, hoping Kaltain would parse her meaning, then feeling silly for not opting to say _‘Are you in love with Dorian?’_ which seemed so much more adult and proper.

 

“I don’t know,” Kaltain said. “I think I do. Or might have done. Or maybe I just like the idea. Is that so wrong?”

 

“I just don’t want to see him get hurt,” Sorscha said.

 

“How…quaint. His ex-girlfriend is so concerned for his safety. Dorian must realise what a lucky young man he is.”

 

“I just know a lot of people don’t see him as a person They just see him as this shiny…thing.” _I would know. I was one of them, once_. “And I know he doesn’t need more of that.”

 

“He is a person,” Kaltain said. “I know that much. The idea of being with him is an idea, and it is an interesting idea, but I know he’s a person. We’re not close, but I know he’s a person.”

 

Sorscha frowned.

 

“You look skeptical.”

 

“It’s just— I mean— Dorian means a lot to me.” _I’ve only known him a short time, but he means— meant a lot to me._

 

 _“I_ already told you I’m hardly going to kiss and tell.”

 

Sorscha tensed. “I recall.”

 

Kaltain sighed. She looked around, gauging how deserted this area was. She spoke, quietly, stepping closer to Sorscha to say it. “The first time I met Dorian, I think I was about four. Five? Three? Around there. It was some big event. My parents brought me. I was in this dress that I loved, with frills and lace, huge frills — I don’t really know how I walked. I tripped a lot. I think my mother joked maybe they were a safety device? But it’s not like I ran around a lot.

 

“It had been warm in the car, and the dress had so many layers and lace. I was hot. I kept asking for water. Anyway, when we were got to this event, obviously my parents sent me off to play with the other children. Dorian was there. We played for a bit and maybe talked. I don’t really remember how it works as children. Then I needed to go to the toilet. And Dorian was only a year older but he was so confident he knew what he was doing. He and this other boy showed me the way, all up these staircases, really far from this— I think it was a ballroom. And we got there, and he opened the door, and let me go in, and his friend with him said he’d wait outside, so Dorian said he’d wait too because he was a gentleman and I was a lady. So that’s what happened.

 

“Dorian was just five, so being a five year old, he and his friend got distracted and wandered off. And me being four and in a mammoth of a frilly dress, I could not figure out all the buttons or keep the skirts up or— well I don’t recall exactly. I was not all of four years old yet, and not all together that bright. I couldn’t take my clothes off to go and ended up wetting myself, I think. And then I started crying, at which point Dorian finally remembered he was supposed to be a gentleman on guard duty, only to be befuddled by my crying. Apologising. But his friend had enough sense to go find some adults, including Dorian’s parents, who certainly gave him an earful. I remember feeling weirdly surprising because _my_ parents weren’t shouting at _me_. Not at that moment, at least. 

 

“Well, Dorian kept apologising, even as my father carried me off to go home — trailing after us, with his tiny entourage of bodyguards who had finally deigned to show up. Maybe I don’t recall properly and they were always there. And then, well, after than, he wrote me— Well, I suppose his parents _made_ him write m— my family a note of apology. It got posted to us later. I don’t remember that much, but I remember his face when we were leaving.

 

“It was guilty even before his parents were scolding him. He always did have such blue eyes. I’d never really seen blue eyes that often in Bellhaven when I was little. Just blacks, and browns and gold. Blue was only ever in picture book illustrations. The books were from Adarlan. I remember thinking his eyes were very blue. Even the sky wasn’t that blue around Bellhaven. The cars exhausts and factory fumes made everything grey most days. His eyes were blue. And they were sad. And I thought that was so interesting, I—“

 

She stopped to swallow, or maybe to catch her breath. Sorscha watched the stilled, controlled movement of her chest.

 

“It’s such a stupid story isn’t it?” Kaltain said. Her voice was a little strange — maybe the way the pitch wavered without quite wavering. “Even stupider than a Crown Prince diving into the shallow end of a public swimming pool.”

 

Sorscha didn’t reply.

 

 

 

 

 

 


	4. (of both the misery and disorders)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kaltain interrupts her daily scheduled bout of pretentious condescension to demonstrate that she is actually not a terrible person. Then ruins it. Repeatedly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm never going to promise when a chapter is done. It's just going to haunt me. There's one passage here that kept blocking this whole thing from getting released. I'm still not super happy with how this turned out but we gotta move on... It's slow burn but there's got to be some progress... Something... 
> 
> Also, notes to remember: the real liar here is Kaltain. Does she lie 100% of the time? No. Of course not. No one could function like that. Is she a liar? Yes, of course she is.

They walked through the meandering corridors of that gallery for a while.

 

Kaltain didn’t seem committed to tackling them in any methodical order and, instead, prompted them to dash in between exhibits at a whim. They had to double back through a lot of places to go back to things she’d recalled seemed amusing. Sorscha didn’t really know what to say or what to make of the art hanging on the wall. All she knew was whether or not she thought it looked nice.

 

Kaltain asked more idle, harmless question that Sorscha found a lot more comfortable to answer: Dorian’s favourite colour, how he liked to change it every so often, but how he always liked white; his favourite food, the general cuisine, all the little sub bits, his favourite restaurant that he’d make Chaol get takeaway from, the way he didn’t eat the chilli sauce with all the things that came with chilli sauce even though that was the whole point of chilli sauce; the things he liked to order at coffee shops — only mainstream franchises, the kind that had hundreds of generic outlets scattered across the nation and obnoxiously branded cups and not indie coffee houses with strange puns for names, sorry, Kaltain — which digressed into anecdotes about the way he like to drink half the cream on top of his coffee, just eating it with a spoon off the top, and then stirring the other half in, and the way he passionately aimed to try every seasonal promotional drink they had on offer; his habit of always typing his phone password wrong the first time because he missed a single number, and did Kaltain ever do that? (It didn’t seem like she would.)

 

She’d never spoken to anyone about Dorian at length before, not like that. She didn’t want to tell her family about it. Something about it felt too raw, too real… And she didn’t know how they’d react, to be honest. She wasn’t sure she wanted to find out — ridiculous as it sounded. What was the worse thing they could say? (She didn’t dare find out.)

 

She didn’t have any close friends (friends at all really) that would let her rant about her boyfriend (ex-boyfriend) and his idiosyncrasies or who would entertain every microscopic detail she noticed about the dimples in his chin (one side a little deeper than the other) and it occurred to her, pouring out the tiny trivialities that made up Dorian and their relationship, that the breakup had never seemed so _real_ as it just did then and that the _relationship_ hadn’t felt just as real as it did then — now. Now that someone else knew. It had stopped being some kind of dream that she could write off as a figment of her imagination, starved to boredom in the summer before school.

 

It was absolutely real.

 

_Was_.

 

Now it was nothing.

 

And she’d done it to herself too.

 

In a way, she had liked it better when he _wasn’t_ real.

 

Dorian Havilliard — before he had simply become just _Dorian_ in her brain — had probably been her first crush. And, honestly, he might have been _everyone’s_ first crush.

 

His face had been plastered enough around magazines and televisions and far flung corners of a nascent internet enough to make the heart of any girl swoon. He looked kind and handsome, and he liked books and he was an actual, real-life _prince_. Sorscha would never meet him in her life, she thought, so why not live a little and wonder what it would be like?

 

No one could make _that_ much fun of you for liking Prince Dorian Havilliard. If anything, you’d just bond — a neat little fan club — until someone who liked him just a bit _too_ much started getting defensive and ruining the fun. But Sorscha had seen enough notebooks decorated with photos of princes and boy band members to know that, in the right places, a fondness for the right boys was always in vogue. It was a harmless fondness too. No one had ever considered that _she’d_ ever be an impediment to their starry-eyed fantasies.

 

Kaltain didn’t talk about Dorian the way girls in class had crooned and cooed after him. Not exactly. It was similar enough, down to a pat, but Sorscha felt there was something _off_ about it — like a photocopy that had been set a little askew when the original was getting scanned through the machine, or a little bit lifted off for a second and page text ran blurry in strange arcs instead of flat and square.

 

It was easy to imagine Kaltain as one of those girls who never paid Sorscha a second’s worth of attention after that first glance-over: a non-threat, unassuming, uninteresting. Kaltain looked at her like that, most of the time. But it still felt off — that same shoddy photocopy effect that filled Sorscha with unease.

 

She wished Kaltain hadn’t told her that story.

 

If she were a different person, maybe she would have thought it was funny. Celaena would have thought it was hilarious, she was sure, and cut Kaltain off at the first mention of having wet herself or maybe even sooner than that, when she confessed to have been unable to undress herself as a child. Perhaps some quip about being spoiled, or needing to know better.

 

He had been nice to her. That was all. He had been nice to her once and she had remembered.

 

There were stupider reasons, more pathetic reasons, to have a crush on someone. That was, if Kaltain’s feelings could even be described as a crush. (But if they couldn’t, what could you even call them?)

 

(Dorian had been nice to her once, too, and that had been enough to agree to watching a movie with him at the cinema another day.)

 

Was it because Kaltain had spied her with Dorian that first night? Or was something else just different about her now?

 

“We’ve been looking at the same painting for about ten minutes now,” Kaltain announced. ‘Announce’ was the most apt word for it. She kept looking, straight on, at the painting, without so much as turning to address Sorscha. She kept her hands behind her back, posture straight.

 

“O-oh?”

 

“I was wondering when you’d complain.”

 

“I…was busy appreciating it.” Why was she lying?

 

“Yes. You certainly seemed deep in thought.”

 

_Don’t reply_.

 

“Is it about the painting, though, I wonder?” Kaltain went on, in that rich drawl of hers.

 

_Damn_.

 

The silence grew heavier.

 

The pressure felt like a weigh on Sorscha’s chest, squeezing the words out of her. “I just can’t stop— I was thinking about that story you told me.”

 

For a second, she thought Kaltain might have flushed red. But it was probably just the heat. The air conditioning in this section of the museum was tepid, blowing warm air through the halls, and Kaltain had resorted to lazily draping her blazer over one shoulder instead of carrying it. But then there was a flash of movement, like biting the inside of her cheek, before she crossed her arms in front of her chest and closed her eyes.

 

She mumbled something.

 

“Huh?”

 

“…It’s not weird,” Kaltain said.

 

“Oh,” Sorscha said. She made a polite ‘hmm’ing noise.

 

Kaltain insisted, “It’s not weird. Some kids just take longer to figure it out.”

 

“What?”

 

“What?” Kaltain repeated.

 

“I was talking about Dorian. How you remembered he was sorry. How he was nice to you that night,” Sorscha said. “What were you talking about?”

 

“…That too, of course.”

 

“Oh. Sorry, I guess I just didn’t really get it…”

 

“It’s a reference,” Kaltain said. It probably wasn’t true.

 

_‘Some kids just take longer to figure it out’?_ Figure what out? At the end of that story, Dorian had been nice to her while she was crying because—

 

Oh.

 

_Oh_.

 

Kaltain was…embarrassed? She was finally fidgeting, not making eye contact, restless (the caffeine had to go _somewhere_ , Sorscha surmised) and that was weirdly, oddly—

 

_Cute,_ Sorscha thought and then she giggled at the thought. She hadn’t meant for slightly hysterical hiccup of laughter to be out loud though.

 

Kaltain scowled and turned away.

 

_Is she actually embarrassed? Have I got the high ground?_

 

Something beeped and buzzed and jolted Sorscha to attention. It figured. Even the gods were conspiring to keep her from laughing. ( _It’s mean to laugh at someone else, though_ , she corrected herself.)

 

“Your phone,” Kaltain said.

 

“What?”

 

“Your phone.” She pointed. “You have a call.”

 

There was a vague tingling in her pocket. Sorscha hadn’t noticed in the midst of her soliloquising. Kaltain’s vision might have been shot from her obsession with LCD screens, but her hearing could still pass muster. Sorscha didn’t hear a blip against the busy murmur of the nearby gift shop.

 

Kaltain stuffed her hands in her pockets. (The skirt had pockets? That was the most practical school uniform she’d ever seen in her life.) Somewhat irate, she said. “Shouldn’t you answer it?”

 

Sorscha wanted to say, sulking and with hands stuffed in pockets, Kaltain looked like a delinquent, but it wouldn’t have been quite true. She was familiar enough with the look to know. Her current school didn’t require any uniforms but at the last there had been girls who would roll up the hems of their skirt and their sleeves and tie their sweaters around their waists while they leaned against pillars and smoked and talked to each other disparagingly about— Okay, maybe Kaltain could have fit in if you just replaced the school uniform and didn’t let her _talk_ to anyone.

 

“Oh. Right. I should. I should.” It was too late. The missed call notification had already popped up. “Oh, it’s my, um— It’s Luca’s dad. Mine and Luca’s dad. One of them.”

 

“Yes, I’m aware of your situation.”

 

“Right. Of course you are. It’s mine and Luca’s dad and he was just wondering where I was and if I’ll be home for dinner.”

 

Sorscha didn’t continue. Kaltain paused, waiting for an answer, before realising it was her turn.

 

“I’m not going to keep you _that_ long,” Kaltain said, and went back to not looking in her general direction anymore.

 

“I’ll just— I’ll text him back.”

 

_I’m at the museum with a friend_ , Sorscha lied in the glorious medium of text message like an actual teenager instead of a sheltered goody-goody, because it was easier to use that word than to figure out what Kaltain actually was. _My employer?_

 

“There,” Sorscha said. “Settled.”

 

The phone buzzed right after. Sorscha was prepared to stuff it into her pocket but Kaltain still had that irate, impatient frown on. Sorscha read the message and as her head flicked down, Kaltain’s expression softened a little. _Probably what she wanted me to do, then._

 

Emrys’s reply on her phone screen filled her with a nagging nausea though. It read, _I’m glad you’re out meeting friends._

 

She really didn’t have any friends did she?

 

Everyone she had known she had known by virtue of Dorian and now she had sabotaged that relationship, what hope was there for her?

 

School would start back up soon anyway. It would be fine. A new opportunity.

 

(A new year to spend alone, hiding in bathrooms, and eating lunches against the smell of disinfectant and stale urine.)

 

The summer would fade into autumn and at least she would have time to admire the cascade of gold and red leaves as she walked from and to school, falling between more crowds of faceless, listless people, shifting through the pathways, not looking at her.

 

(—And time to watch Luca and his girlfriend hold hands in the halls, pressed up against walls, giggling to each other as their pack of friends looked on and made gagging gestures before laughing and patting them on the back and her: alone, just alone like she would always be forever—)

 

People would flit by, only looking forward, or down at their phones, but Sorscha, waiting at bus stops, would avoid the glances of other people and examine the ground, tiled with warmly coloured leaves that were so bright, even amidst the ever darkening, greying skies, .

 

(Leaves that were down there because they were dead, and discarded, and there, ready to rot and be tread on, and rained on, and the dirt would cake and pound on them until they were swept away or settled into the soil into nothingness.)

 

Nothing. Nothing.

 

_I’m glad you’re out meeting friends_.

 

She was a liar.

 

She heard some noise — tinny and muffled, like being underwater. Tapping. Tapping. Tapping. She felt like she was in a horror story for a second, wondering if there was a dead beating heat buried under the museum’s floorboards to match all the dead people buried under layers of paint until she looked up (or was it _down_?) to see Kaltain’s impatiently tapping foot.

 

“Settled?” she said.

 

Sorscha looked at her phone. The screen was flickering. (That wasn’t good. It’d cost a fortune to fix. At least if it had just been the glass she would have been able to deal with it.) Her fingers slammed, clumsy and awkward, trying to dismiss the message. When she stuffed it into her bag she realised the screen was fine — it was just her shaking hands. (Why were her hands shaking?”

 

“Yeah, it’s all fine.”

 

(Liar.)

 

“Hmm.” Kaltain looked off in the distance. Sorscha tracked her gaze.

 

By now, following after her had proved to be something of a gut instinct. It was free to come here, technically, but the realisation hit and coiled, cold and heavy, in the pit of her stomach: Sorscha was as out of place flanked by years of history and art as she had been at that rooftop restaurant, underdressed and with Dorian Havilliard, suit and tie and wallet loaded with more money than she’d ever feel comfortable carrying around in public. When she was trailing after Kaltain, at least it felt like everyone could tell _why_ she was…intruding here.

 

She was cursing that newly developed habit now. Kaltain had been looking at a small commotion brewing in the hallway. A boy with his hoodie pulled up, drawstring around the hood pulled tight to hide his face, was being escorted down the hall, flanked by guards their dark blue uniforms.

 

“That seems interesting,” Kaltain blandly observed before returning to the apparently _more_ interesting company of her phone.

 

Sorscha kept staring.

 

The boy was quiet. He yanked his arm away from one of the guards and there was some yelling before they continued on. One of them stopped and waved at the rest of them to continue onwards before glancing around the rest of the area and bringing his walkie-talkie up to his face.

 

Was—

 

Was that security guard looking at her? She hadn’t done anything wrong. She hadn’t done anything _wrong_.

 

Her heart was pounding. She felt it beat in her chest, pounding against her ribs — a scared and frenzied animal. The pressure it made — pushing and pulsing — made it seem like her ribcage was going to burst open. But at the same time, it was like she wasn’t there at all.

 

Sharp, visceral pangs cut through her chest like a fire, but there was a cold sweat on her brow. Her hands felt heavy, like wading through water, but when she tried to moved them it was like they were twitching too far and fast. Like she was there and she wasn’t. Like everything hurt while she was looking at herself from far away.

 

Her chest just hurt. She could’t feel the rise and fall of anything.

 

People moved, or at least it seemed like they had, but all she registered was the flicker of colours shifting. Every flicker made her jumpy, waiting for something to run away from — only her feet didn’t seem like they could move at all.

 

The streak of dark blue — the security guard — moved again.

 

It was too easy to see his dark uniform against the stark, clinical white of all the museum walls. He _was_ looking at her.

 

He had to be.

 

But why?

 

_She_ _hadn’t done anything_.

 

The panic of the moment slackened her grip, not really noticing until another passerby bumped her in the shoulder to get past. Her phone tumbled down and landed with a clatter.

 

Her bag fell too. The contents splayed out across the floor. She ducked down to chase after them: papers, bus passes, her keys, packs of tissue, free ballpoint pens rescued from who knows where. Kaltain did not lean down to help her pick up any of it, but she did wait, quiet and without a word of commentary, or even a stern look.

 

Sorscha babbled out an apology, more raking her belongings into a pile then into a bag. It was worries than trying to sweep dust into the terrible novelty dustpan and broom set Luca had bought for Emrys and Malakai’s last anniversary under the assumption they wouldn’t be serious about actually using it. Sorscha said as much, apologies deteriorating into rambling, winding, unpunctuated bouts of speech that might have resembled words if one had the correct imagination.

 

Kaltain blinked. She didn’t say anything in reply. Her arms were crossed across her chest.

 

Sorscha’s own chest tightened, trapped in an invisible vice, burning with the cold keen edge gnawing on her — a sensation of being watched.

 

Her eyes stung. Her vision blurred, wet. She couldn’t cry. It would be humiliating. Kaltain would hate it, lose her patience, storm out of here. She couldn’t cry. She’d cause a scene. Already, there were people looking. They weren’t suppose to. No one should have been looking. She couldn’t cry. She couldn’t.

 

“I just— I’ll just— I’m just going to—”

 

She couldn’t pick anything up. Why couldn’t she pick anything up? She felt like an idiot child, knocking blocks around on the floor. Her fingers fumbled over everything, dropping things just short of falling into her bag. The clatter against the floor repeated with every failure, each sharp noise ringing closer and louder in her head.

 

Why couldn’t she just do it?

 

Again, Kaltain didn’t say anything else but she heard her take a deep breath that might have been a sigh and the security guard that had been glaring at her from around the corner was suddenly _gone_ and _had_ he been speaking to someone on his walkie-talkie before because Sorscha was going to die right there and then if she ended up being _kicked out_ of an art museum like some kind of— All because she—

 

She wondered just how loud she was getting, if this stream of consciousness rant had turned into a gushing torrent — a breach in the dam kind of rush — that had drawn strange, pitying, disgusted looks from passers by and a security guard.

 

Kaltain picked the bag up, contents shoved inside and not quite contained because of their poor arrangement, and shoved it into her chest until the the force made her stagger backwards a little.

 

“ _Hold_ it,” Kaltain ordered, eyes flicking down for a second to notice Sorscha’s limp, dangling arms. “Let’s go.”

 

“Oh, uh—” She had to suck down air to be able to speak, to make vague semblance of recognisable noises. It forced her to remember the cadence of breathing. “—Right.”

 

Kaltain looked through her, the way you would ignore a deranged person on the train, before turning away, nose wrinkling. In distaste? In disgust? Sorscha’s chest threatened constricted against itself again. Sorscha felt it teetering on the edge, like a knife against her throat.

 

The security guard had come back, his walkie-talkie half raised to his face, with an appraising expression on his face. Kaltain shot him a scathing glance and he slunk back around the corner. The pressure in Sorscha’s lungs lighten and she took a deep breath.

 

Kaltain had already started walking away. Sorscha trailed after her. Again, Kaltain did not bother to check that she followed. Sorscha was starting to think her frantic footsteps, on small legs trying to chase after the other girl’s pace, were enough of a signal of that.

 

“Let’s sit down,” Kaltain said. She sat down before Sorscha replied. The empty bench was just a slab of white stone. She paused for a minute, wondering if they were trespassing on some modern art, before joining her to sit on the opposite edge. Kaltain gave a sidelong glance before setting her bag and blazer down between them. Sorscha didn’t take off her own bag. She kept it tight and upright and wished she’d just bought a model with a zipper on top instead of a tote.

 

Kaltain didn’t ask if she was okay. Sorscha didn’t know, exactly, why she thought she might. Dorian would have. But Dorian wasn’t here and—

 

She would have to think about it again, wouldn’t she? Kaltain wanted to heard about Dorian, though the actual realisation of what she’d done to him had almost caused a panic attack.

 

The thrumming of her heart came in ebbs and waves. Kaltain kept her hands in her lap, staring distantly forward. Sorscha kept watching for her to reach for her phone, watching the way her empty, idle fingers would twitch for something to do in its absence, but she didn’t and didn’t and didn’t and eventually Sorscha’s pulse, though still more skittish than a rabbit poking its head out the warren, didn’t seem to pound so loud.

 

Kaltain just waited.

 

Sorscha ran through scripts in her head, plotting the words she was going to say.

 

“I— I think that was just—”

 

“I know what it was,” Kaltain said.

 

Sorscha stopped. She looked down at her hands, balled into fists in her lap. She flexed out her fingers. There were half moon dents, welling up red in her palms. She ran her fingers over them, trying to map where they might have had to been to dig, tried to observe the way her grip formed into something solid.

 

“My parents,” she began, at last. “When my parents were alive, my first parents I mean, we visited the national gallery — the admission is free — and my father was showing me the paintings. I was riding on his shoulders, I remember. He was showing me a painting, so we were close to it, and he was pointing something out. I got overexcited and leaned to close and I can’t remember if I triggered an alarm of if a guard yelled at us and—”

 

“I can’t imagine you getting overexcited,” Kaltain said. Sorscha couldn’t tell if it was sarcastic, an insult, or just honest. But the interruption forced her to take a breath.

 

Words. Clear words. Clear works spoken slowly. She could say them like that. With measure and gravity and not a sense of unease in the world. It wouldn’t be hard. All she had to do was copy the way Kaltain was speaking, right?

 

“That’s why I— I mean, everyone was looking at me, and I might have been causing a scene, but I wouldn’t have— But just then I saw that guard, and I really _did_ start to panic. That’s why it happened. It was dumb. I just made it worse on myself. I shouldn’t have freaked out. So that’s why that happened.”

 

“You don’t have to tell me,” Kaltain said. Her fingers laced and unlaced against themselves. “I didn’t ask. I thought I made it clear I was just here for details about the ex-boyfriend.”

 

Sorscha wanted to laugh, but she didn’t know if that would be appropriate. Was it actually a joke, or was she being serious? She bit the inside of her cheek to stop from making and sudden noises. Perhaps it made her look grimly pensive. That would be a good feeling to convey. “Do you know how he became my ex-boyfriend?”

 

It was rhetorical. Kaltain had asked the ‘why’ before, but not the ‘how’. Sorscha just needed the question to make herself believe she was a storyteller, and that she could explain it, and that it didn’t matter that she was telling this to someone else.

 

“Dorian always liked to impress. He always felt like he had to prove himself with this or that,” Sorscha said. “Before it was to his father, then it was to his mother, now it’s to… Well, I suppose it’s to the country. To prove that the royal family isn’t just a wasteful extravagance.”

 

“That’s quite an interesting theory,” Kaltain said, “but go back to the part about Dorian.”

 

She didn’t think she’d ever be so keen to bring up the subject of Dorian with anybody. “Even on our last date, it was this grand restaurant.”

 

“Yes, I know. I was there too,” Kaltain said. She examined her nails. “Although I’ll disagree on how impressive that place was.”

 

“I had already decided,” she said. “When he first asked me out, the week before, I had already set myself a deadline. ‘I need to do it by this day’ _._ But he picked the date that day. He was so excited. He said I was going to love it.

 

“I should have told him sooner. But it made him happy. He just wanted to do something special. So I let him. Maybe that was crueller. He was just so excited when he picked me up and then when we sat down and when he ordered it was like he’d studied the whole menu already just to know what was good and what I’d like. I couldn’t— I didn’t have the heart. I kept thinking about whether I should or shouldn’t or if I should extend my deadline or just wait until the end of the date or not do it at all because, I mean, I’d have to be _insane_ to, right?

 

“I’d never been to a place like that. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he’d done for me. All the things he’d done for me. And the worry must have shown on my face because he got worried too and I just couldn’t look at him with that face anymore so I just— I just blurted it out.

 

“Then he smiled his stupid sad Dorian smile and told me he was going to accept my decision and that he understood and that I had a fair point since he was going away soon anyway. But he still offered to at least finish the dinner because we were already there and it was so awkward for the rest of the night because he was just _trying even harder_ to make things not weird when they were and—

 

“I feel like I did it too fast. There were more things I wanted to tell him. There were things I wanted to make sure he knew about. And I didn’t—” _I told him I wanted to break up with him and practically ran away because I couldn’t handle how he looked at me for the rest of the night_.

 

Did he know?

 

He must have known.

 

Would it even matter to him, if he knew what she thought of him? Would it give him some comfort, or let him strive harder or would he waste his time thinking about her instead of how to trudge forward?

 

_I was proud of him_.

 

But what was one girl being proud of him next to a nation, or a crown, or parents that could never be satisfied? Could she really have called herself anything relating to the kind of boy Dorian was? She wasn’t cut out to be his girlfriend.

 

He needed something more.

 

_Kaltain would have been able to do it well_ , came the traitorous thought, unbidden. She wouldn’t have quaked before cameras or bodyguards or a million voices writing hate comments on news articles and online photos. _But he didn’t pick anyone like Kaltain. He picked me_.

 

“It wouldn’t have worked out anyway,” she said, maybe more to herself than Kaltain. “He was going to be going away for so long. Even long-standing relationships get strained by that. Let alone a…summer fling.”

 

The words left a bitter taste in her mouth. _Reality must be a bitter pill to swallow_.

 

“Hmm,” Kaltain said, as if Sorscha was a cloakroom clerk who had accidentally passed her the wrong bag, instead of _pouring out honesty_. “Well, that’s more about you than your ex-boyfriend but I suppose it’s useful to know, in a roundabout fashion.”

 

Sorscha bit her tongue.

 

Kaltain continued. “Teen boy angst, teen girl angst, it’s all the same really. Let it never be said I was not equal in my disdain of everyone.”

 

“I don’t know what you expect,” Sorscha said. “I told you I’d never gone out with him that long.”

 

“ ‘ _It’s not just time that matters when it comes to matters of the heart_ ’.”

 

“What?”

 

Kaltain scoffed. “And _you_ had the _gall_ to say you were from Fenharrow.”

 

“Is that a saying? It sounds like something you just made up.”

 

Kaltain ignored the comment. She said, “You broke up with him a week ago, and you did it out of some sense of alienation and the inability to deal with long distance. Both of which are fine, upstanding, reasonable causes for dissatisfaction with a relationship. And now you can’t speak to him to clear up any feelings either of you might have. But he’s not dead. He’s doing his service, which is what he wanted to do to show people he was just like everyone else, which is what you wanted him to be able to show. So really you’re all getting what you want.”

 

Sorscha tried to laugh a little. It did make her chest hurt less. “It’s probably or the best he’s not here to drunkenly text me something he’d regret. He’s impulsive that way.”

 

“Adarlanian boys don’t get to keep cell phones when they’re doing their service, right? I heard that girlfriend and families and the like send letters instead. Maybe you don’t want to actually send him anything, but you’ll feel better if you pretend and write one. Just write one. You don’t have to send it.”

 

“I just feel so…”

 

“So what?”

 

“Guilty.” She swallowed, bit back tears and the tremor in her voice. “I hate feeling like this.”

 

“Then don’t.”

 

“What?”

 

“Just don’t then.” Kaltain’s expression was either bored or annoyed or maybe her face just looked like that all the some — a smear of vague disdain and perpetual condescension.

 

“I can’t just—“

 

Kaltain let out an exaggerated sigh that covered most of continued Sorscha’s sputtering attempts to butt into the conversation.

 

“What do you have to feel guilty about? You didn’t do anything wrong. You parted on good terms. Unless you’re mincing words about the breakup.” Kaltain frowned. “I do hope someone’s been keeping their word.”

 

“Of course I am! I feel awful! Did I lead him on? I didn’t think through it at all. What did I think was going to happen? It’s just one summer. Did I think he would just leave it alone after that? Did I want it to go on for longer? If I think that he wanted to let it end after just a summer too, does that mean I thought he was just after some fun? But I know he’s not like that… Not anymore… Not with me, he said. And I know that sounds terrible but he didn’t really mean it like _that_.”

 

“The slew of exes and flings he’s left behind his wake say otherwise but alright. I think I can believe _he_ believed that about himself.”

 

Sorscha decided to ignore it. It had so far proved to be the best policy with anything unpleasant Kaltain said.

 

“I just still feel really terrible.”

 

“If you didn’t want to feel bad about breaking up with him then you shouldn’t have broken up with him.”

 

“But I wanted to break up with him! I had good reasons!”

 

“Okay, then you got what you wanted. Some might call that a ‘win’. Is winning so wrong?”

 

“I guess not.”

 

“Winning is supposed to be fun, you know.” Kaltain gave a dry smile. “I suppose I shouldn’t expect so much for someone so poorly versed in that arena.”

 

“I win things sometimes.”

 

“Sure.”

 

“I have this deal with _you_.”

 

“I’m forced to agree with you there. Do you feel guilty about this?”

 

“What?”

 

“About _me?”_

 

“ _No_.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because… Because we have an agreement.”

 

“Because you have to suffer my company, is what you mean to say,” Kaltain said, punctuating her words with an pretentious flourish of her hands, like she was the super villain in a comic and this was the preface to a long speech about a gaping contradiction in the hero’s idealistic worldview.

 

_She does like speeches_ , Sorscha thought. _It’s going to hit any second now_.

 

“You don’t feel guilty because there’s nothing to feel guilty over,” Kaltain dictated.

 

_I wish she’d stop telling me how I feel_.

 

“As you said, we have an arrangement. It’s win-win. Your brother is not being put to trial for various acts of vandalism and miscellaneous misdemeanours. I get some…pleasant conversations. With the caveat I’ve had to pry them out of you but still. Pleasant. Nothing worthwhile in life ever came easy, right?”

 

Kaltain shot her a facsimile of a charming smile. Sorscha tried to keep the grimace off her face.

 

“We both got something. We both benefitted. We both agreed to do something. Everyone is happy.” She looked at Sorscha’s face. “Some more than others, perhaps, but that’s a matter of perspective.”

 

Sorscha crossed her arms over her chest.

 

“Would you say you and Dorian had a win-win relationship?”

 

“ _Excuse me_?”

 

“Well, the way you keep insisting you’re so guilty, I’d have to assume you were some kind of parasitic leech. Oh. Wait. That’s redundant. Just a parasite, then. It’s bad to waste words, yes?”

 

“That is— That is _not_ —”

 

“So…what? Did Dorian enjoy being in a relationship with you or not?”

 

“I— As far as I can tell he—”

 

That ungracious snort of laughter made itself heard again.

 

Sorscha dug her heels in. “Of course he did!”

 

“Oh? Was it so burdensome on _you_ , then?”

 

“You don’t know the first thing about me. Or us! Or— Or—!”

 

Sorscha couldn’t stop herself. She didn’t _want_ to stop herself.

 

She just _went_.

 

She told Kaltain that she was being presumptuous. She told Kaltain that she was rude and cold and _no_ she was not like Dorian at all because Dorian at least _felt bad_ about when he made mistakes, actually could _regret_ the choices he made actually wanted to _help other people_ not just to make himself feel better about crying girls and stressed out mothers and tired best friends and tabloid headlines because he wanted to _grow up_ and that was a hell of a lot more worthwhile than whatever Kaltain was doing now playing games with people’s head because she was bored and had too much money to toss around.

 

She told Kaltain that _of course_ it was a _pleasure_ to have ever known a boy as sweet and thoughtful as Dorian. She told her that it had been a joy to talk to him, to text him to hear him ramble about the stupid way he was particular about the relish he would eat with his takeaway or his favourite childhood cartoon or the sports he liked that Sorscha still didn’t really know the rules to. She told her that it had been an honour to hear his problems, and to know he felt like he could tell them to her.

 

She told Kaltain that she like having him around, liked knowing he’d listen to anything she wanted to say, that’d he’d wait through any pause, smiling and patient and kind. She liked him. She liked being around him. She liked the feelings she had around him. Of course it wasn’t burdensome and of course the both of them had been happy.

 

She went on and on and relished at the two or three points when Kaltain actually _flinched_ and she was ready to _bask_ in having rendered Kaltain speechless _for once_ when—

 

“Great.” Kaltain clapped her hands together softly, like the host of a cooking show just before the cooking started. “Then we have all the evidence we need.”

 

“ _What_?”

 

Kaltain tapped at the now empty space on the bench next her. “Oh, take a seat, would you? Let’s have a civilised conversation. Hmm. No? Okay, I’ll just get started anyway then. You just get around to that whenever you feel like it.

 

“You liked Dorian. Dorian liked you. You entered what appears to be, by all observation, a perfectly healthy, respectable relationship where you enjoyed each other’s company, grew a little as people, blah blah blah.

 

“As time went on, the circumstances in which your relationship operated changed. This meant the things you had originally given each other in the relationship could not really work. Actually, let’s just say “happen”. That stuff couldn’t ‘happen’. Dorian then proceeded to overcompensate, no doubt, in an attempt to fix without realising he was actually making things worse and so you _both_ got unhappy because of how things were working out.

 

“So, if two people are unhappy in a relationship, is it so wrong to break up?”

 

Sorscha readjusted the way her bag strap sat across her shoulder. “It’s not wrong.”

 

_…I wish she’d stop making reasonable arguments._

 

“Now, that’s not to say it was a perpetual unhappiness. I’m sure in the start it was very good. That’s why things start at all, usually. But some things just need to get trimmed before they get worse.”Kaltain stopped. There was something almost like sentiment there in her voice. “Yes. At the beginning, he must have been very happy.”

 

_I think he was. I think_ I _was_. _But_ … “It wasn’t going to last.”

 

“No. I suppose not.”

 

“It’s not so bad.” Sorscha licked her lips. They were dried and chapped. She hugged her bag tight against her chest. “Things don’t always have to last to be good.”

 

Sorscha thought of dewdrops in the grass and the sun in the sky just before twilight.

 

She remembered what she could of her father’s broad hands, of wrapping her tiny fingers around his pinky to cross the street. She remembered, sometimes, a distant, misty feeling when she walked by the right streets in ‘ethnic’ enclaves of Rifthold, wondering what was the food she had to order from the street stalls to be abel to feel like that forever and what little paper bag stuffed with food held to key to going back there.

 

She thought of Dorian’s smile and a bolt of laughter. His eyes were blue and bright. She thought of the way he’d look at her, like she demanded her existence be known.

 

She thought of the pleasant quiet at home before anyone else had woken up.

 

Quiet.

 

Kaltain had never been one to let a moment settle with its proper weight though. Not when it was one of _Sorscha_ ’ _s_ moments. She scooted forward on the bench, gathering her things and Sorscha scrambled to stand up, presuming they were going to go, only to realise Kaltain was still sitting down.

 

“You had your sickeningly cute relationship with each other. It was fun, life-changing, whatever. Girl get validation. Boy gets kick up the ass to be a human being. Future marches on. Parties come to bittersweet understanding and part ways. Truly the stuff of summer sleeper hits and box office breakthroughs. Very storybook picturesque. But unfortunately not very replicable. Which is not so great for _me_ , but I don’t think you’re particularly concerned with that part.”

 

Sorscha rolled her eyes. “How ever did you figure that out?”

 

Kaltain yawned, eyes closed, and stretched, taking up as much space on the bench as she could. Sorscha shrank back a little, pushed to the edge to avoid her hand.“You know, if you don’t want people to think you’re interesting, you should be less interesting.”

 

“Sorry?”

 

Kaltain snickered, leaning back into her seat. “Forget it. You won’t understand it yet. Remember it if you like. Or just forget it if it bothers you.”

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about at all.”

 

“Don’t worry. I know you do.” Kaltain smiled a little. It was not as sharp as she supposed she was used to. Perhaps is was the sunlight coming in from the window. Celaena had liked photography. She’d told Sorscha that natural light always looked best. It could be softer than overhead, indoor lighting. The sunlight was warm, but not red. The edges of Kaltain’s hair caught it still glinting a true black. Dorian’s would be edged chestnut brown in the sun, she recalled.

 

It was unsettling to think about him, still, no matter what Kaltain had told her. “I…is that everything?”

 

The air hung heavy. Sorscha looked down at her shoe, and rubbed the toe of it against the side of another, scratching a non-existent itch. Kaltain look at her phone again: just the lock screen, just the time.

 

“Sure,” Kaltain said. “We can end it for today.”

 

It was very quiet. Sorscha could hear the wind whoosh out of the vents, a small reprise from the summer heat. She could hear her own saliva as she swallowed it down her too dry throat. She could hear the way the rough canvas of her shoes scrapped against themselves as she just kept fidgeting.

 

She said, “Okay then.”

 

“Sure, okay,” Kaltain said. Her hand, with the phone it in, moved. It might have been a wave. “B—“

 

Sorscha’s stomach cut in.

 

Mortified, by the loud, churning gurgle it made, she felt her face heat up. She could feel the blood rushing to her hot, surely reddening ears. One of her hands was covering her face, she realised. She could not meet Kaltain in the eye.

 

Kaltain said, “Hey.”

 

Sorscha wiled herself to look up.

 

“Do you want to grab lunch?”

 

* * *

 

 

“I’ll pay,” Kaltain said as they were waiting in line.

 

The museum had three different cafes. Kaltain had elected to go to the one furthest from where they were. Sorscha assumed it was because of her apparent familiarity with her place rather than just enjoying making Sorscha walk long distances through gallery hall after gallery hall.

 

“Pick whatever you like,” she had told Sorscha. “Same principles as the coffee we were supposed to have.”

 

Sorscha kindly did not point out that Kaltain had already paid for their coffees at a cafe before getting bored and migrating them to this museum. Instead, she did as Kaltain asked and they sat down next to uncleared trays filled with paper cups that had shallow brown pools of tepid liquid in them and brown parchment paper dusted with bread crumbs.

 

It was not technically lunch. It was a little late for that. And anything she would eat now would probably _ruin_ her appetite for dinner. Yet who was she to turn down the offer now? Once the panic and general feelings of unease had lifted, Sorscha realised she really was hungry.

 

She had picked a sandwich. Kaltain had bought a quiche and picked it out of the foil half-heartedly with a nothing but fork to poke holes into perforated lines through it—grids of dots and then patterns.

 

“I didn’t think you’d be the type to play with your food.”

 

“I just got bored again,” Kaltain said. She took a sip of her bottled sparkling water. “It happens quite often. Besides, I don’t particularly care that much about food. Whatever you need to stay alive, and I suppose that’s that. Food’s just fuel. Thought it is easier to keep down if it tastes good.”

 

“I’m not sure I really believe that story.”

 

“I have exceptional taste. Don’t you worry.”

 

Kaltain didn’t show much interest in actually eating her food. She speared a corner of quiche and held it up to the light, examining it from odd angles before she sniffed it and then finally put it in her mouth. She chewed slowly but silently. Sorscha looked at her sandwich, already half-eaten, and resolved to slow down her own pace too. She unscrewed her bottle of orange juice.

 

“When’s your curfew?” Kaltain said, palm pressing into her cheek, elbow suddenly leaning on the table. Bored, she supposed. How long had Sorscha been staring at her food?

 

“I don’t— I don’t really have a curfew. If I can’t be back for dinner I just call.”

 

“Lenient,” Kaltain observed. “Though, since you’re _you_ , I doubt you take much advantage of it.”

 

“It’s just for the summer.”

 

“And yet I’d wager the only time you used that freedom was to bail out your motorcycle thief brother.”

 

Sorscha did deign to respond. Whatever nice moments they had been having between them, Kaltain seemed determined to blow to bits. Sorscha frowned, which only made Kaltain smirk, taking it, no doubt, as a victory. Unless she was just…teasing? She bit her lip.

 

Kaltain said, “Is it any good?”

 

“Huh?”

 

Kaltain gestured with her fork at the half-finished sandwich and the dusting of breadcrumbs scattered across the table. The crust was good, crunchy, drizzled with fancy olive oil. Fancier bread than the soft loaves they bought from the supermarket and that Luca slathered in peanut butter and/or assorted chocolate spreads in the morning. “Is it decent? You stopped eating.”

 

“Oh.” Sorscha brushed the crumbs into a corner and picked the sandwich back up. “It’s good. It’s good, I was just taking a break.”

 

“Don’t force yourself to finish,” Kaltain said. She pushed her quiche across the table, fingers just pinching the foil casing. She set her fork on a napkin, set square straight, and leaned back in her seat.

 

“Are you done?”

 

“Hmm? Oh. Yeah.” Kaltain glanced out at the people walking through the halls. Sorscha followed her gaze to the clock hanging on the wall.

 

“Are you in a rush?”

 

“Not at all. Take your time.” She nudged the quiche another inch forward across the table. “Have that too if you want.”

 

“Is it bad?”

 

“Find out, if you’re curious.”

 

So she did. After she finished her mouthful of sandwich, she set it down on the plate and brought the quiche over to her tray. It was actually good. Emrys had demonstrated how a quiche was _supposed_ to be made after too many poorly done school means had almost made her swear off the things. The catering at the museum was excellent. And if the quiche was a clock, Kaltain had left a good eight hours of it alone and intact.

 

“It’s good,” she said. The looked at the big clock mounted on the wall of the cafe area. Part of it was shaded in, perhaps to resemble the shadow cast on a sundial, and the sharp triangle that would otherwise have been mounted to it to cast the shadow. It was pretty late for lunch. Sorscha idly wondered if she was ruining her appetite for dinner and if Emrys would be upset at her for it. Unlikely. Luca would just hoover up the leftovers into himself. ”Aren’t you hungry?”

 

Kaltain’s fingers drummed against her arm. “Not really.”

 

“Oh,” Sorscha said. Then she took a bit of the quiche. She chewed.

 

“I’m going to get some air.” Kaltain said, suddenly. She set her phone down in front of Sorscha, the exact counterpoint of their table. “Collateral. You wait here.”

 

“You’re not afraid I’ll walk away with it or try to break into it?”

 

Kaltain laughed. “Not hardly. But I think you’d be the type to worry I ran away.”

 

“Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

 

A shrug. “I’m rich, but I’d still rather avoid having to buy another phone. Who knows what secrets are hiding on that? See you in a bit.”

 

* * *

 

Kaltain’s phone was just lying there on the tray, true to her word.

 

Sorscha didn’t know why she was so hesitant to take Kaltain on her word about anything when, so far, she had delivered on everything she had promised. Likability didn’t have much to do with _reliability_ as far as their arrangements went. Going back on your business deals was surely less than ideal for any budding schemer or whatever it was Kaltain was aspiring towards being, but she supposed that sort of dedication to form might not necessarily translate into other realms. Kaltain hardly appeared the type to dine and dash (and there was no way she could in this situation given she’d already paid for the both of them) but Sorscha wouldn’t have been surprised to find out if she had some predilection to always arriving at social gatherings late or cancelling on people after agreeing to meet them at the cinema or something.

 

A phone was a good as a snippet to a person’s character as you really got these days. Kaltain had just left hers there. The only thing scarier than having someone else look through your phone was being the kind of person who didn’t care if anyone else looked through your phone.

 

It was probably locked, Sorscha told herself. Who didn’t put a lock on their phone screen these days. And besides, just because it was lying there didn’t make it acceptable to snoop around.

 

But Sorscha just wanted to check the time.

 

She wanted to check the time so she reached over and turned Kaltain’s phone towards her, tapped the near edgeless smartphone screen awake and saw, alongside a digital clock that neatly proclaimed the time in twenty four hour format, that Kaltain’s phone locked itself with a simple four digit code. Not the most adept of security measures, but common, and effective enough to serve it’s purpose. Sorscha could hardly spent the next five or however few minutes it was trying out all ten thousand digit combinations that might unlock it.

 

A number code, then. Not one of those swipe patterns or a longer password. Just four numbers. What did _that_ say about Kaltain, if anything at all?

 

There wasn’t much to do in the meantime, waiting for the other girl to return, so Sorscha figured she might as well indulge herself in this exercise on people watching. (Watching was not one hundred percent the correct term, but the gist of it was captured there.)

 

For that model and operating system of phone, a four digit code was the standard and default security measure. People who used the default internet browser on their computers were different from the people who went and installed new ones, so did that mean Kaltain wasn’t as much of a can-do go-getter as she projected?

 

On the other hand, a four digit number code was among the fastest way for you to unlock a phone. (Given, of course, that you _knew_ what the answer was.) So, perhaps, it suggested Kaltain was _exactly_ as much of a can-do go-getter as she projected. No time to waste fumbling with phone unlocks and given how often one would have to do it, even in a day, it made sense.

 

A pattern unlock might serve the same purpose, but that would require installation of a whole bunch of jailbreaking plug ins and such that would void the warranty on the phone. So not that kind of a person, then. Kaltain didn’t seem to find any particular need to customise everything exactly to an idiosyncratic pretense which was as much as given considering her choice brand of smartphone, the most popular and possibly overpriced, on the market.

 

It was the latest model too, Sorscha realised. A constant upgrade-er, or just, by happenstance, up with the trends after a long time with an older make? There was too much ambiguity there to tell. Not enough clues and too much speculation. It was fun, but it didn’t really tell her anything substantial.

 

The phone itself, then. Not a scuff mark, dent or scratch on it. Either spectacularly new, or very well taken care of. There was a screen protector on it, mirror finish to her non-surprise, which suggested the latter. The case had a few cracks down the side too, which only contributed to that theory. The case itself was a sleek and slim thing, not affecting the thinness of the phone very much or its weight nor obscuring the camera lens or the lightbulb that provided the limited flash, in an obnoxious peacock pattern—not an HQ photo, but an artist’s rendering that gave that sort of impression of the lavish greens, golds and blues found there in that sort of a pattern. Highly visible.

 

But it was silly to try and reduce someone to a single possession. Even if it could be done, would this be the right item to try and summarise that too?

 

Sorscha didn’t know why she was putting so much attention on a phone. Was there really nothing else to do? She could be fabricating cover stories or going over in her head whatever else there was to say about Dorian, confining things to prune off unnecessary details, pretending she couldn’t remember them. But there actually wasn’t much to worry about with Dorian because he was such a good guy in the first place. He didn’t have much in the line of dirty secrets to tell, only some personal ones that would just feel like a large betrayal to go off saying.

 

* * *

 

When Kaltain returned, it was abundantly clear where she’d run off to. The smell of cigarette smoke clung to her hair and pretty clothes. The blazer was off, draped over her arm in a way that blocked any view of the school crests printed on them. She slid back into her seat across from view.

 

“I wasn’t gone too long, I hope.”

 

“It was fine,” Sorscha said. The traces of smoke were strong. How fast did Kaltain go through them? Nothing she really wanted to focus on. She wrinkled her nose.

 

Kaltain dragged her shirt up by her collar to her face and sniffed. “It’s not that bad. Now come along. We might as well finish the museum before I send you home.”

 

Kaltain didn’t lead her around by the arm, mostly because it seemed like she thought she was above shepherding people around physically. She was totally confident that Sorscha would follow her around. She never broke her pace and didn’t even bother looking back to check if Sorscha was behind her.

 

To her credit, Sorscha always _was_ behind her but…

 

It was still presumptuous. Annoyingly so.

 

She tried not to think about how she’d admitted — but only in her own head — that it was comforting, in a weird way, to follow Kaltain around if only because she always seemed to know where she was going.

 

_I could just_ not _follow her_ , she thought. _She should at least ask me._

 

She could. She could stop in the hall right now and make a game of counting how long it would take Kaltain to figure out there was no one behind her. She could just go home now. They were done here, technically. There was no more talk of Dorian, just pictures on the wall. She could leave. She didn’t have to follow anyone.

 

But Sorscha didn’t really feel like doing that.

 

* * *

 

 

There really was only one museum space left to venture through. Sorscha had already told Kaltain all there was to know about Dorian, and Kaltain had seemed content to let the session end there. At least she had been until she’d heard Sorscha’s stomach grumble. And apart from a single question about Dorian’s food preferences (that Sorscha had probably volunteered far too much information to) she hadn’t poked or prodded any more on the matter. It had almost been nice. Sorscha didn’t visit museums a lot. She realised she liked them a lot more than she remembered. Maybe one of these days she could convince Emrys and Malakai to drag Luca out and they could make a family day out of it. Luca needed a bit more cultural appreciation in him. And it would be at least one day where he couldn’t get himself in to trouble. She glanced around and remembered the innumerable precious artefacts and priceless works of art enclosed in the museum walls. Well, maybe not.

 

Someone else was already exiting and holding the door open to the museum so at least Sorscha didn’t have to deal with the indignity of fetching Kaltain’s doors for her again. There was another small mercy.

 

_Oh, gods above, if you’re trying to be nice to be now, can you please save it for later? I don’t want to spending my remaining meagre blessings making things slightly less awkward around Kaltain Rompier._

 

And then, answering her prayers, the gods saw fit to make this atmosphere between her and Kaltain awkward again. Sorscha took two steps out of the door (one straight out, then one to the side to make sure she wasn’t blocking the entrance) and planted herself in position. Kaltain looked ready to walk off before she realised Sorscha was just sort of…standing there: fixed.

 

Why _was_ she standing there? Wait, no, _wasn’t_ she supposed to stand there. With no further obligations, museum or Dorian between them, shouldn’t they just part ways? But the last time they did, Kaltain had at least said some goodbyes. Sorscha felt foolish. Like a schoolchild in class waiting for their teacher to _dismiss_ them. But it was too late to just _walk away_ now. That would have seemed ruder, and weirder.

 

“Thanks for the history lesson,” Sorscha said, trying to make conversation like a normal human being. She reminded herself about all the things she needed to look into: the large, lone dot on the gargantuan canvas; the layers of corpses hidden behind layers more of gentle meadows and meticulous oil paints; the pipe that was not a pipe. The pep talk about breaking up with Dorian. “The art appreciation, I mean. And stuff.”

 

_‘And stuff’?!_

 

“Don’t thank me,” Kaltain said. “I just like the sound of my own voice. Most people can’t stand it, especially when they hear it recorded and played back at them. Aren’t I special?”

 

Sorscha didn’t know how to respond to that. She went for something conservative and uncontroversial. “You’re great.”

 

Kaltain’s smirk widened a little and hopefully that was a good sign. But then she rolled her eyes a little too and that didn’t seem to bode well.

 

“I already know that,” Kaltain said. “I thought I asked you to only tell me interesting things.”

 

“Oh, um, well,” Sorscha said.

 

“Positively riveting.”

 

Had she just been joking? A friendlier tone would have been helpful for figuring that out. Since it was Kaltain, it was entirely believable that she was being serious. (But…did that actually make it funnier? If she wasn’t stuck in her participant position maybe she’d be better poised to understand. Sorscha was not enjoying being ripped her comfortable niche as an outside observer.)

 

“How do you get home?”

 

“I’ll just, uh,” Sorscha said. “I’ll take the bus.”

 

“Do you know where your stop is supposed to be and what bus to take?”

 

No. But she wanted to leave. “Yes.”

 

“Oh? Which bus?”

 

Ugh. “Fifty one.”

 

“Fifty one, huh? Is it at the bus stop by the West Exit? The one near the obnoxious billboard for those headphones that are really popular these days, endorsed by that singer-actor who was in that movie about surviving an earthquake disaster on a different planet that aired last summer, I mean.”

 

“Yeah, that one.”

 

“None of those things I mentioned exist.”

 

She swallowed. “You don’t say?”

 

“I do indeed say.”

 

Sorscha swallowed harder. “Why are you concerned?”

 

“Who says I am? I just don’t want you to get lost on your way back. I did change the location on short notice, after all.”

 

“Would you feel bad if I got lost?”

 

“I’d feel inconvenienced because your poor opinion of me holding up your time might affect the quality of information I get at our last meeting.”

 

That sounded plausible.

 

“I can figure it out.”

 

“That would be best, yes.”

 

It was worse than that time in class where the teacher wouldn’t let her out to use the toilet until all the nuances of _may_ vs _can_ had been ironed out — in front of the whole class.

 

“I _will_ figure it out.” _You can go now_ was her intention, but none of that had been received. Not that she was looking forward to trying to decode the bus maps that put ancient glyphs to shame.

 

Kaltain rolled her eyes. “Just look it up on your phone.”

 

“I, um,” she said. “I don’t have any internet credit left.” Her quota renewed tomorrow, she didn’t want to say, although maybe it would have made her look more competent, like she actually knew how to manage life.

 

Kaltain looked at her in the most scathing way. “Look it up on mine.”

 

She held out her unlocked phone screen. There really was something intimidating about a person with no qualms aboutother people looking through their phones. If she’d asked to look at Kaltain’s photo section, there probably wouldn’t be any hesitation there either. If their were weird photos, she wouldn’t have the nerve to point them out or even dare think they were weird. If there were bad photos— No, there was no way there was going to be bad photos of Kaltain on that phone.

 

“Go on, then,” Kaltain said, looking away. Sorscha felt very much like a horse, that a rider had tolook away from because herbivorous animals like that got easily startled by eye contact this deflection of attention really was calming her nerves.

 

Sorscha took the phone out of Kaltain’s hand. Kaltain continued to keep looking away, giving one big sigh, before finally turning back when Sorscha had fixed her gaze firmly to the screen and away from any potentially scary faces.

 

“Alright?”

 

“Fine.”

 

“Did it?”

 

“Almost.”

 

“Okay.”

 

This was— She was actually kind of nice.

 

* * *

 

An hour after she got home, there was another text on her phone from Kaltain.

 

_Did you get home safe or are you dead?_

 

Sorscha felt like being annoying that night, so she just replied: _Yes_.

 

_Fine_.

 

She really was actually kind of nice.

 

_By the way, still have your student card. Oops. Or not oops. Hope you won’t be needing that soon. Lol._

 

Never mind.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kaltain spent five minutes agonising over how to tell Sorscha she forgot to give back Sorscha’s student card while maintaining maximum asshole tone. The clear answer was to write ‘Lol’ at the end. And the ‘oops’.
> 
> Outstanding. A+. Knocked it out of the park there, Rompier. I hope you’re proud of yourself because someone has to be.


End file.
